Without Reservations, The Travels of An Independent Woman

How many women would love to have the fol­lowing quote as a part of their own per­sonal journal, real or imagined? “Six years ago, on a winter’s day not unlike this one, … I decided to jump ship, so to speak, from the life I’d fash­ioned for myself.”

Without Reser­va­tions is not another one of those memoirs of an angry woman marching off to the beat of her own drum. I imme­di­ately bonded with Steinbach’s words, “…jump ship, so to speak.” It was the “so to speak” that told me this was a woman of some caution, a writer who chose her words to carry the maximum amount of meaning. Steinbach, a Pulitzer Prize winning jour­nalist from the Bal­timore Sun, was also a single mother of two college graduate sons, a home­owner, a pet owner, and in short, a suc­cessful woman with many responsibilities.

Steinbach’s inner voice told her: “After fifteen years of writing stories about other people, you need to get back into the nar­rative of your own life.” For the next several months, she made her plans to take a European sab­batical: she had a job to secure, a person to find to care for her house and her pets, and time to con­vince herself that she was “a woman in search of an adventure,” and it was time to “Say yes to life instead of no.”

The author’s journey takes her to a small hotel in Paris, to London, to Oxford, to the rich scenery of Tuscany and then back to the same small hotel in Paris. She keeps track of her travels and the moments that will live beyond the months of her adventure by writing post­cards to herself. Along the way, Steinbach meets a won­derful variety of people, ordinary and note­worthy, men and women, single and married, young and old. Among those, she meets herself as solitary traveler, a woman who learns to connect with the strangers she meets and the physical world in which she travels. The writing is moving, honest and often star­tling in its clarity of thought.

This review is written years after first reading the book. I’m already rereading it, again, finding it is as fresh today as it was in 2003 when spotted on my boss’s Advance Review shelf. I could not sell it fast enough. For the years with that store, I sold almost one or two copies a month. In all that time, not one cus­tomer came back to say they did not love this book. My favorite response was from a cus­tomer who poked her head in the store doorway on her way to Safeway, raised her copy of the book, caught my eye, and said, “Most important book I’ve ever read.” High praise. Well deserved.