Travel writers born, not made?
If ever you were in doubt that nepotism is alive and well, you’d need look no further than the travel writing industry to see that it is. Who knew guidebooks were the stuff of travel royalty?
Take Arthur Frommer’s daughter, Pauline, for example. She has her own line of guidebooks. Incidentally, I learned about her writing through Arthur Frommer’s delightfully insightful and curmudgeonly travel blog, of which I am an avid reader. With marketing like that, she’s bound to succeed.
And then there was the big scandal a while back about Max Gogarty, son of The Guardian‘s travel writer Paul Gogarty. Guardian readers were none too happy to hear that 18-year-old Max had scored a travel blog on the Guardian site to document his privileged international partying. Comments were so harsh that they seem to have actually prevented the blog from going past the first entry.
The latest edition to the travel writing offspring pack is Rick Steve’s daughter Jackie, who has a blog on her father’s website to document her summer romp around Europe. The reception she has received has been vastly different to poor Max’s, with most of her commenters sounding like concerned mothers, wringing their hands as they read about the 18-year-old’s encounters with Italian boys and red-light districts. I wonder if the comments are heavily moderated, or if ‘concerned mother’ types are just the kind of folks who read Rick Steves’s site. I suppose the latter is pretty plausible.
(As an aside, I am so insanely impressed with Rick Steve’s recent trip to Iran. I have never been a particular fan of his, but this self-funded adventure in cultural understanding has earned him huge amounts of respect from me. I really hope I get a chance to see the show that comes out of it.)
So my question is, why oh why couldn’t I have been born into travel-writing royalty?
