If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ve probably seen me bent over a notebook documenting my various travel adventures or random musings about life. Over the years, I’ve acquired a stack of them: some thin and spiral bound with chicken-scratch handwriting and others thick and doodled with water-logged coffee stains.
It’s been a huge dream of mine to author a book, but I’ve always put it on the back burner to pursue other projects. After completing a PhD, a postdoc and transitioning into research consulting, so much of my mental energy was spent in my day job that I didn’t have much left for my own creative work.
Plus, I hadn’t fully landed on what exactly I wanted to write about. I’ve always intuitively known the content of my future book was in my notebooks, but it took some thought to clearly articulate what I wanted to say beyond just relaying travel tales.
This year, I returned to Bali in May 2024 and within a week, I received the inspiration for my debut book: a travel memoir based on my first trip to Bali in 2022. It quite literally flowed from me and five weeks later, I had a completed draft.
‘With Love from Bali’ is an unfiltered recount of an extended wellness trip that turned into a late-life neurodivergent diagnosis. The book uses playful, self-deprecating humour to poke fun at myself and the range of characters you’ll find on the island. As per usual, there are countless chaotic and awkward situations and misadventures for your reading pleasure.
With Love from Bali chronicles one woman’s six-month soul-searching journey on the island of the Gods. It would be cliché if it wasn’t so chaotic…
By outward appearances, travel influencer Stephanie Huff is living the dream, working her way around the world and sharing her adventures on her popular blog. Yet, years of living out of a suitcase and drifting from place to place have taken a mental toll. After a series of dramatic events and questionable decisions lead to a bedridden illness, she decides to ‘press pause’ on her life and go to Bali. What follows are a string of disastrous dates, contentious characters, travel mishaps and inexplicable encounters that leave her with more questions than answers. When her mental health continues to plummet, she experiences a reckoning of faith and life lessons in unexpected places.
A mix between ‘Eat Pray Love’ and ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’, this honest, cringe-worthy and often funny debut memoir will resonate with any wanderer or seeker on their own journey.
SHOP THE BOOK!
With love from Bali,
Steph xx
The post I Wrote a Travel Memoir: ‘With Love from Bali’ appeared first on .
