I first read this book when I was a teenager. I think it was shortly after I had discovered the travel memoir genre thanks to Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun, Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country and Peter Mayle’s A Year In Provence. I loved the armchair exploration of places and cultures I yearned to visit, and I was looking for more. I don’t remember where I found this book, though my battered paperback has a penciled-in price on the first page, so I suspect it was on one of my many forays into the depths of a used bookstore. Wherever I found this, it has been traveling with me for more than 25 years and 15 moves, so something about it must have connected with me. My memory of it was quite vague however – and, as it turned out, completely inaccurate.
In my memory this was a memoir of a woman traveling alone and her courageous move to a small town in Mexico – San Miguel Allende. I thought I remembered idyllic, sun-soaked patios, beautiful desert landscapes, some pleasant interactions with other travelers and the locals and lots of time spent lost in her writing. In my memory there were flowers and tidy sunny rooms and an adventure that felt only a little bit dangerous on the edges. This, as it turns out, is NOT what this book is actually like. At all. To the point where I am now questioning pretty much all my memories of books I read that long ago. I have no idea how I managed to misconstrue, misremember and misunderstand this book so completely. Here’s what it’s actually about.
Morris does, in fact, move to San Miguel Allende. But it’s not some idyllic writer’s retreat. She has some grant money and is looking for somewhere as far as she can get from an abusive ex in New York City. In fact, in the beginning of the book she’s still bearing the bruises of this relationship – literally. And San Miguel itself is not the beautiful desert retreat I somehow made it into in my own mind. Especially not the part Morris moves to. She moves to the poorest part of the town, where it’s dangerous for her to go out at night, where her neighbours don’t have basic things like running water or, often, food. She meets locals whose lives have been and will remain horrendously difficult. Her best friend and neighbour has a string of children from various relationships (which don’t sound like they were much better than Morris’s last one) and lives with a man who has multiple families. The neighbourhood is dirty, dangerous and full of desperation and tragedy. The ex-pats she meets are equally troubled – at best damaged, at worst predatory.
Her experiences are equally dark. She travels around Latin America, and each trip is fraught with danger and violence. She witnesses sudden death, poverty, political unrest, threatened communities and is herself nearly attacked. When she’s not traveling, her time in San Miguel is itself difficult. She has to deal with illness, insect infestations, segregation, loneliness, and a lot of uncertainty. She has a brief relationship with a young man that starts well, but descends into distrust and hurt. There are some lovely moments – she makes friends with a neighbour, experiences some lovely moments when she’s out in nature and during her travels, has an opportunity to explore her own limits and figure out her needs. She’s able to help some of those around her, and learns a lot about a culture very different from her own. But the main feeling that was left with me when I finished the book was that of someone who is a bit lost, uncertain and who finds herself surrounded by some of the same darkness she’s battling in her own life.
It’s odd how much a book can change for you when read at different points in life. The first time I read it it represented independence, possibility and the wonder of encountering new places and people. It filled me with hope that I’d get to see the world that was out there waiting to be discovered. Now that I’m (much) older and have been through a fair amount of shit, it hits very differently. It represents the things that traumatize us in life, the unfairness of economic inequality, how people take advantage of one another, the untrustworthiness of a lot of people and the disproportionate extra danger that is inherent in being a woman. I felt the heaviness of the things she’s trying to deal with, the issues she has that paralyze her in her life and leave her feeling like she is not in control of her own fate.
Given how different this reading experience was for me, it’s hard to know how to feel about this book now. I still hold the feelings I took from it upon first reading, but now they’re overwritten by the darker ones that I was left with after my re-read. I do think, however, that it’s a valuable book for those who enjoy learning about what life is really like in developing countries in Latin America, for those who are dealing with their own darkness and for anyone who is curious about what it’s like to not only travel, but to re-patriate as a woman alone. There’s a lot to think about in this book, and it has definitely still stuck with me.
Traveling from the highland desert of northern Mexico to the steaming jungles of Honduras, from the seashore of the Caribbean to the exquisite highlands of Guatemala, Mary Morris, a celebrated writer of both fiction and nonfiction, confronts the realities of place, poverty, machismo, and selfhood. As she experiences the rawness and precariousness of life in another culture, Morris begins to hear echoes of her own life and her own sense of deprivation. And she begins, too, to overcome the struggles of the past that have held her back personally; as in the very best travel writing, Morris effectively explores her own soul while exploring new terrain and new experience. By crossing such boundaries throughout the pages of Nothing to Declare , she sets new frontiers for herself as a woman—and as a writer. – Goodreads
Book Title: Nothing to Declare
Author: Mary Morris
Series: No
Edition: Paperback
Published By: Picador
Released: January 1, 1987
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Travel, Latin America
Pages: 250
Date Read: July 22-31, 2023
Rating: 7/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.72/5 (1,552 ratings)
