Part adventure guide, part personal diary, and 100% inspiring, Mary Morris’ All the Way to the Tigers – a memoir rich in personal growth, family history, and thrilling travel – is a thoughtful account of how she came back from a debilitating accident to realize a hard-won trek across India, on which, yes, she comes across a real-life version of the symbolic tiger of her triumph. She is sharing thoughts on her journey with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, the true story of 12 siblings, half of them schizophrenic.
In Conversation: On All the Way to the Tigers
In Conversation: On All the Way to the Tigers
Author:
Mary Morris, Robert Kolker
Robert Kolker
Journalist and writer Robert Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named a New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2013 and one of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Books of 2014. His work has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O the Oprah Magazine, and Men’s Journal. He is a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim 2011 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Mary Morris
Mary Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels Gateway to the Moon, The Jazz Palace, A Mother’s Love, and House Arrest, and also of nonfiction, including the travel classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. A casual afternoon of ice skating in February 2008 derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. On Easter Sunday, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was instead lying on the sofa with Death in Venice, reading again and again: “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.” Disaster shifted to possibility and she made a decision: when she was well enough to walk again (and her doctor wasn’t sure she ever would), she would go “all the way to the tigers.” So begins a three-year odyssey that takes Morris to India in search of the world’s most elusive apex predator. Her first lesson: don’t look for a tiger because you won’t find it–you look for signs of a tiger. And all unseen tigers, hiding in the bush, are referred to as “she.” Her weeks on tiger safari also afford a new understanding of herself. Written in over a hundred short chapters, All the Way to the Tigers (Nan A. Talese) offers an elegiac, wry, and wise look at a woman on the road and