A Hard Place to Leave

In these essays, Marcia DeSanctis simultaneously navigates the globe while carving out a second career as a travel writer for major magazines, all while navigating her own past and the bumpy, sometimes complicated road of midlife.

Marcia's voice has quiet power, restraint, and unadulterated honesty. She is unafraid to reveal her vulnerabilities, hurts, and failures. Her narrative style has won her many accolades, including five Lowell Thomas Awards for excellence in travel journalism and the 2021 Solas Award for Travel Story of the Year.

Above all, her stories are about restlessness, the human desire to keep moving. As such, her stories have joyful exuberance, a sense of wonder, and pack a strong emotional punch.

The essays appeal to anyone who craves a compelling storytelling voice, especially from a writer with an astonishing lifetime of stories—working for Barbara Walters at ABC News and travelling the world as an international journalist.

These rich essays dig deep into human vulnerability and concern the intersection of time and place, home and the road, the past and the present, igniting readers' imaginations.

Marcia is an experienced working journalist and is deeply cognisant of cultural sensitivities. With a master's degree in foreign policy from Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, she approaches her work with high intellectual awareness. Though her writing is full of wonder, her work as a traveller is not about what she discovers, especially in developing countries but rather what the place helps her discover about herself.

Many of these essays have been published in leading outlets: Vogue, Travel + Leisure, BBC, Town & Country, LitHub, The Millions, Creative Nonfiction, The New York Times, Air Mail, to name but a few, and Marcia retains excellent relationships with her editors in these publications.

Marcia's prior book, 100 PLACES IN FRANCE EVERY WOMAN SHOULD GO, debuted as a New York Times Travel Bestseller.

All of these essays, some in a memoir format about people she met long ago in her travels as a foreign correspondent, were written between the ages of 50 and 60. Women, especially women of a certain age, are hungry for inspiring, literary stories told by someone relatable, whom they trust. Women are 13 per cent more likely than men to have read a book in the last year.

Books of essays are ideally suited for our attention-challenged population, and each of Marcia's essays is a fully formed narrative that is both subtle and powerful.

Writing is Marcia's second career, and this book will embolden its readers—and may inspire them to pick up their pens and write, to mine their past for a story about a memory that has stayed with them. Marcia teaches at the annual Book Passage Travel Writing Conference and has witnessed first-hand the passion of female or middle-aged reader-writers, or both, seeking literary role models.

There is a broad target audience for readers of bold travel writing and fans of Anthony Bourdain, Mary Morris, Andrew McCarthy, Elizabeth Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed, Paul Theroux, Peter Mayle, Alain de Botton, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Wheeler, Don George, Jan Morris.

Parallel target audience for readers of meditative essays about life, parenting, ageing, womanhood including fans of Dani Shapiro, Jo Ann Beard, Leslie Jamieson, Rebecca Solnit, Mary Laura Philpott, Sloane Crossley.

Marcia has a devoted following of readers, students, and other travel writers worldwide and has lectured at women's clubs throughout the world.

Marcia has contacts at all the major networks, podcasts geared to travel, book podcasts, podcasts about women, and podcasts about women over 50. She also has strong relationships with Maria Shriver's SUNDAY PAPER newsletter (250,000 subscribers).