Memory Maps by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

I am a wanderer: one with a hoarder’s love of houses and things… I am tracing here a memory map of all the places that have stayed with me and, since this is also a map of all the voyages of discovery, this is also the story of getting to those places.
I have followed this writer’s exotic life over the years through magazine and newspaper articles and, of course, her books, both fact and fiction. She is perhaps one of few writers left I would like to hear talk about her work.
Memory Maps trawls through a lifetime of travel and living abroad including South America, Venice, Umbria, the Caribbean and finally Montmartre. She writes beautifully, wistfully about leaving Venice and then the Villa Quarata in the Umbrian village of Morra. It was not meant to end in tears:
‘I thought I would live and die here, and yet, per forza, as they say in Italian, I am moving on.’
Having read A Valley in Italy, an inspiring memoir of renovating a ‘half-ruined palace in the woods’ I too felt devastated when she was forced to sell the home she loved.
Lisa St. Aubin de Teran writes movingly of failed marriages and crushed dreams but her spirit is intact:
‘Sorting out the maps and memories has been the large stage of clearing my decks.
I find as Anne Frank did before me, that, 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart'. Sometimes that goodness is buried so deep it takes a shovel to unearth it.
I used to think I was different. Now I feel I am not so different from anyone else: the time and the places have been different, that is all.’