Shannon Leone Fowler on Traveling After Her Fiancé’s Death

Karen Joy Fowler: When you were in the fourth grade, you wrote a book called The Zookeeper Capers. I think the narrator was a chimp?

Shannon Leone Fowler: Yes, it was from the point of view of a chimpanzee and was all about the misadventures of the chimp’s zookeeper. I named the zookeeper Rolf after Rolf Benirschke, the kicker for the San Diego Chargers, because he donated money with each kick to research of endangered animals at the San Diego Zoo.

KJF: That’s right—you were so taken with him when you were nine years old. You had quite a considerable success with that book.

SLF: I did. I won Best Originality at the Davis Book Fair.

KJF: And The Zookeeper Capers was so clearly the prototype for my novel all those years later, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. But in spite of this early success, I remember both you and your brother telling me you didn’t want to be writers. You thought it looked lonely to go off in a room all by yourself and not talk to anybody for hours.

SLF: Nothing changes how you value being alone like having your own kids. Now that I’m a single mom of three very young children, having a job where I get to be alone is a dream come true. [KJF laughs] I can’t think of anything better than to have hours on end when no one is making demands of me, pulling on my clothes, or insisting on coming with me when I go to the bathroom.

KJF: So you wrote Traveling with Ghosts while raising your kids. And you’re still interested in animals—the book has a lot of marine biology, and of course Sean’s death from a box jellyfish. This is a grief memoir, and you’ve gotten a lot of response to the grief part, but it’s also a travel memoir, and my impression is that there’s been less response to the travel part.

SLF: Yes, the vast majority of personal messages from readers as well as the media have been about Sean’s death, and I wasn’t entirely anticipating that. Because although the book is very much centered around Sean’s death, the bulk of the story is the journey after and the travel that I did following. I think the lessons I learned that were the most surprising and profound were the lessons I learned traveling. So I wasn’t entirely prepared for the focus on Sean’s death, although I guess I should have been because it’s so shocking. But it was difficult at the beginning because I was thinking I was going to have conversations about these amazing Israeli girls or the resilience of Bosnia, and instead I kept finding myself back on the beach in Thailand.

KJF: The travels, of course, weren’t a fun trip at all. But like animals, it’s been a constant thread in your life that you love to travel. From the time you were a very little girl, you always liked to go to new places and see new things. Do you have any sense of when that bug bit?

SLF: I think, as you know, the first trip that we took was when we went to England and Scotland when I was 14.

KJF: Yeah, it’s kind of a strange fact about the family that you went to another country before you went out of state.

SLF: I know, my eldest has already been to 13 countries.

KJF: And he’s six years old.

SLF: The baby is two and she’s been to nine countries. But I was 14 before I left the United States, and then I loved it. While I was in high school, we also went to Canada and Mexico, and I loved every place we visited.

I think there’s something about the unknown, something about waking up and not having any idea where the day is going to take you. Not knowing where I’m going to sleep, how I’m going to get money, what I’m going to eat. Although that often ends in disappointment, with terrible places to stay and awful food, when it ends well, it’s such a gift, and there are so few truly wonderful surprises in life.

I think it’s the same reason I love the ocean. You sink below the surface and suddenly there’s no Internet, no telephones, no traffic—it’s cold and dark and quiet. You’re practically weightless, and surrounded by different forms of life, big and microscopic. It’s the unknown, this other world; it’s exploration, and leaving everything that you understand behind. Plunging yourself in somewhere foreign, where you have to figure it out and find new ways of doing things. So I think my love of the ocean and my love of travel are related.

KJF: Well, that’s interesting. I never put the two of them together quite like that. Because you took your first international trip when you were 14, but you had spent summer after summer by then at the ocean. Do you think your initial attraction to the ocean was as you described?

SLF: Where I grew up, where we lived, in Davis—this inland, idyllic, tiny university town, we could bike everywhere, but it was far from the ocean. So the ocean represented everything that wasn’t.

Wasn’t day-to-day, wasn’t understood. Travel and the ocean to me are this expanse into the unknown. I think spending the summers in San Diego with Grandpa Bob had a huge impact, because he was like a guidebook to the ocean. He was like having a Lonely Planet guide to this new world, and he could teach me how to try to navigate it safely and tell me all these little secrets about the sea.

“Travel and the ocean to me are this expanse into the unknown.”

KJF: Well, speaking of safety and the risk of the unknown, as your mother, when I read this book, I cannot help but notice you doing a lot of things that could have turned out so badly. And now you’re a mother yourself—can you look at some of the choices you made and think maybe that wasn’t such a good idea even though it worked out?

SLF: Certainly when I was writing, particularly the Sarajevo chapter, I could see how bad some of my decisions were after Sean’s death. The fact that I went with this crazy woman from the bus station and stayed in a cellar . . .

KJF: This windowless basement!

SLF: Below a shop, and I couldn’t even lock my door, and no one else was staying there, and I had no phone. That was absurd. It turned out fine, but it really could have not. Would I want my children doing that? Absolutely not. But because Sean died and we weren’t taking any risks—in Thailand we were playing it safe, we thought we were being boring—a part of me then thought, What the hell was the point in trying to be careful? I’m very lucky Sarajevo turned out the way it did; the people in Bosnia were amazing. But years later, we watched that movie together . . .

KJF: The Whistleblower, with Rachel Weisz. I know, that was terrifying.

SLF: And that sex trafficking was going on while I was there, with the US security forces, and the UN troops turning a blind eye, all after the siege had ended. So we watched that movie, and both thought, Oh my God.

KJF: Yes. And I didn’t even know you were in Sarajevo, so you could have just disappeared off the face of the earth.

SLF: No one knew I was in Sarajevo. I mentioned to the Israeli girls that I was thinking about Bosnia, but I hadn’t told anyone I was going because I didn’t want anyone to worry. So no one even knew I was in Sarajevo.

And of course things like arriving into Cluj-Napoca at midnight—I’ve got no Romanian money and no idea where I’m staying or where anything is. But it was totally fine, people were really helpful! Yet would I want my kid landing somewhere at midnight with no local currency and no reservations and no idea? No. No.

KJF: Good, that’s all I ask. Moving on—I’ve done very little personal essay writing myself, but people have lots of ideas about what’s fair and what’s not in memoir. There’s a sense everything you include should be true, which is already tricky because our memories can be unreliable. But I’ve heard some say it’s even unfair to cut things . . .

SLF: Wow.

KJF: That any shaping of it makes it artificial. As a memoirist, how do you feel about that?

SLF: Because I had my journals, and I wrote in my journals obsessively, filled pages daily . . .

KJF: You do have an astonishing level of detail: the waiter had this kind of mustache and this song was playing in the background.

SLF: And that’s because I wrote it all down. The level of detail I had, even though I started writing the book five years later, was almost overwhelming. When I write how much I paid for a meal at a milk bar in Poland, I know because I wrote it all down: how I paid, the menu translation, what the server looked like, who I sat next to. So if I’d had to write this book without cutting anything, it would have been a book no one wanted to read. If you can’t shape the story, it’s not a story, it’s just someone’s journal and stream of consciousness.

I guess that’s where the line between fiction and nonfiction gets blurred. I remember taking a short class in memoir and the teacher said, “Writing memoir is easy; you just write down what happened.” But I think this couldn’t be further from the truth. For me, with memoir, you already have the characters and the plot and you can’t change that, but everything else is up for grabs. The order you tell the story in, which little details you use, which little details you don’t, the secrets you let the reader in on and at which points. I think that’s all very much like writing fiction. You can’t change the characters and you can’t change what happened, and in some ways I found that a relief. Sometimes my editor or my agent might say, “I’d really like it if you came off a bit better in this scene.” And I could only say, “Sorry, but I didn’t! It’s not the way it happened.” [KJF laughs] I liked that concrete aspect.

But I could still play with how I decided to tell all the things I couldn’t change.

“For me, with memoir, you already have the characters and the plot and you can’t change that, but everything else is up for grabs.”

KJF: One of the major impetuses for writing Traveling with Ghosts was that you found the American way of dealing with death and grief so unhelpful. You responded well to the rules the Israeli girls had when they dealt with you. And there was a time when there were a lot of rules in America about grief. There were specific time frames: heavy mourning, half mourning, and light mourning, and the clothing would reflect this so everybody would know. Do you think that would be a good idea? Or I know you also liked being anonymous sometimes.

SLF: I think the problem with rules, always, is that they are going to work for some people and not for everyone. For me, as you know, I’ve never been very good at pretending. So although I thought I might like that idea of being anonymous, it never worked out very well for me because I usually ended up breaking down and telling someone after I’d had a drink or something. I’ve never been someone who can really pull that off, but I’m sure many people are much better at it. I did find the rules of shiva incredibly helpful, that it was dictated how a mourner behaves, and how people around the mourner behave.

KJF: It seemed more how the people around the mourner behave.

SLF: But that’s because only the girls knew what they were doing. There are rules for the mourner, too—rules about ripping your clothing, lighting candles, not cutting your hair—but I wasn’t following these because I didn’t know. So the shiva rules I wrote about in the book were what the two girls were doing for me.

Maybe some people would find these rules confining. But I think having a set of traditions, if anything, helps people to be around someone in mourning. Our culture is at such a loss as to how to deal with grief that people in mourning are avoided, and that’s probably the worst thing that can happen. As I say at the end of the book, “Grief needs time and space, but it also needs company.”

KJF: This is an intensely personal story. I think one of the reasons that I shy away from memoir is a sense of protective privacy. You are so openly out there in Traveling with Ghosts, and in interviews and responses you’re getting such personal, sometimes intrusive questions. Are you comfortable with that?

SLF: I am, mostly. As an American living in London, I think Americans tend to be quite open. Because I wrote the book based on my journals, there was already a deeply personal voice I was using to write. And I’ve told you many times that the only way I could write the book was to not worry about what people would think—my family, my kids when they were older, my friends and neighbors. So that was the only way I could write this story, was to not think about anyone actually reading it. Then I finished the book and started revising, and then I sold the book and was editing, and then copyediting. I really didn’t think about having my personal story out there in the world until the excerpt appeared in the Guardian newspaper right before publication.

I was with my kids and we were making pancakes—flour everywhere and the counters sticky with boysenberry syrup—and it was this really typical weekend morning except all of a sudden, the darkest, deepest, saddest parts of my life were on the Internet and strangers were responding online. And the only people I could immediately share this with were my very young children, who couldn’t possibly understand.

I remember calling you up and telling you that maybe I’d made a mistake, that I didn’t know if it was the right thing to have done, and by then of course, it was too late. So it was harder than I thought it would be.

But the book came out in February and it’s now August, and every week, I continue to get incredibly personal messages from readers. It’s almost always people who’ve lost someone, they’ve lost a lover or a parent or a child, and their stories are harrowing and so sad. But they’ve connected with my words, and found some kind of comfort. I think that makes up for whatever uncomfortableness I have at having my own story out there. So when I called you up and said that I think I might have made a mistake, you told me that if it helps anyone, then it’s a more important book than a bestseller. That if it reaches people and makes a difference in someone’s life, what more can you ask for?