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    Unavailable
    The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust
    Unavailable
    The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust
    Unavailable
    The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A young woman chafing at the confines of marriage confronts the high cost of craving freedom and adventure

    At twenty-five, as her wedding date approached, Laura Smith began to feel trapped. Not by her fiancé, who shared her appetite for adventure, but by the unsettling idea that it was hard to be at once married and free.

    Laura wanted her life to be different. She wanted her marriage to be different. And she found in the strangely captivating story of another restless young woman determined to live without constraints both an enticement and a challenge. Barbara Newhall Follett was a free-spirited trailblazer who published her first novel at 11, enlisted as a deck hand on a boat bound for the south China seas at 15 and was one of the first women to hike the Appalachian trail. Then in December 1939, when she was not much older than Laura, she walked out of her apartment on a quiet tree-lined street in Brookline, leaving behind a fraying marriage, and vanished without a trace. Obsessed by her story, Laura set off to find out what had happened.

    The Art of Vanishing is a riveting mystery and a piercing exploration of marriage and convention that asks deep and uncomfortable questions: Why do we give up on our childhood dreams? Is marriage a golden noose? Must we find ourselves in the same row houses with Pottery Barn lamps telling our kids to behave? Searingly honest and written with a raw intensity, it will challenge you to rethink your most intimate decisions and may just upend your life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 6, 2018
    ISBN9780525530015
    Unavailable
    The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust

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    Reviews for The Art of Vanishing

    3.5/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Reads like a first book yes, but a very skillful examination nonetheless of marriage, relationships and wanting to be your own person while with someone else. I very much look forward to what Laura Smith does next. This writer has a very bright future ahead of her.
    • 2/5
      The narrator is the ultimate of privileged, millennial self involvement. Her constant ruminating about how she should be living her life began to grate about halfway through. I kept reading only to learn the fate of Barbara, a much more interesting character although she had been dead for many years. But this turned out to be a disappointment. The efforts made by the narrator to find clues were Herculean and admirable, but enumerated in so much micro detail as to be overwhelmingly boring. A fascinating lost character to seek out but an unsatisfying book.

      1 person found this helpful