For 20 years, I was on the run across the US, but it’s only recently that I have realised what I was running from, writes the novelist Jami Attenberg
If I tell you I didn’t have a bed frame until I was 44 years old, can we all pretend I was a minimalist and not some odd bird flapping her wings all over the country? “Peripatetic” was a word I learned when I was in my early 20s – I remember looking it up after reading it somewhere, and thinking: “That sounds familiar.” I grew up in a small town in Illinois, where I lived until I went to university in Baltimore; but once I graduated I went on the run across the US, as if someone were chasing me, or as if I were running towards something – at the time, I could never truly decide which.
During that time my mother had nicknamed me “the Wandering Jew”, which was a term for both a mythical man cursed to walk the earth until the second coming and a purple plant that thrives in wet regions (I chose to identify with the plant). My parents watched that spark ignite within me, beginning with a year at college, studying at the University of East Anglia where I spent my holidays with the rest of the diligent American travellers backpacking through Europe, sleeping in grimy youth hostels or upright on overnight trains. There I fell in and out with people on the road, and we always looked out for each other.