Ireland, by Laurie Woolever

Ireland is welcoming, beautiful and full of charm, but when you're young and dumb and defining yourself by what you despise, you might need to pull an Irish exit.

Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor who has collaborated with Anthony Bourdain on three New York Times bestsellers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, and Food & Wine. Her recent memoir Care and Feeding debuted at #8 on the New York Times bestseller list.

In July of 1997, I took my 23-year-old self to Ireland for two weeks. I’d been living in New York for a year, working as a private cook for a family who largely subsisted on brown rice and vegetables (or, as my then-role model/celebrity crush, Showgirls’ Crystal Connors called it, “doggie chow”).

When I remember this trip, it is mostly as a failed experiment, during which I took meticulous notes in a wire-bound journal, a gift from my then-therapist. I know now that it’s weird for a therapist to give a client a gift. I knew then that it was weird to spot her passed out and drooling at 2pm on a Saturday on the E train, wearing an intolerably jaunty straw hat, after which I terminated our therapeutic relationship, decided to go off my antidepressants, and sloppily planned a trip to Dublin, Galway and Cork. I was just an un-self-aware young alcoholic seeking to fill my God-shaped hole with Guinness (and ideally, semi-functional Irish cock).

How best should a young, inexperienced budget traveler start to see the world? All the evidence at that time pointed to traveling with a handful of other people. I’d done that a few years prior, boarding my first-ever flight, from Newark to Charles de Gaulle, to visit four friends who were studying abroad in Paris. Moving as a pack had been essential since I spoke no French and knew nothing about the city, but I have always found group projects (summer camp, family holidays) extremely irritating and thoroughly draining. A few years ago, one of my closest friends gave me the kindest gift when she got married, which was to entirely absolve me of bridesmaid obligations. I have never felt more seen and understood.

I didn’t know exactly what I wanted out of Ireland, but I knew what I didn’t want: to do lame shit with lame people. I guess I did know what I wanted: to do cool shit with cool people. I wanted to have adventures, bring back some stories. Flinging myself at Ireland with only the barest outline of a plan, expecting only serendipitous perfect fun and endless romantic delight, was very much in line with how I was living my nascent adult life in late-90s America.

Within the year, I would immediately fall in love with no fewer than four drunken hookups. I would confidently come out as a full-on lesbian to my mother, based on a single encounter, then quietly slink back to the hetero bench when that situation fizzled out. I would enroll in culinary school, based on a claim in New York magazine that chefs earned $85,000 a year. The truth is always more complicated. I have permanent brain damage from all the times I banged my head against the wall and failed to learn anything.

Back in 1997, the internet existed, but it was not yet up to the task of helping a young adventure seeker figure out what exactly to do. I had a Discover card and a Lonely Planet Ireland book and the same fractional ownership of Irish ancestry that characterized nearly all the white American people I’d ever known or been related to.

Apart from the travel guide, I brought two other books with me: a collection of Charles Bukowski poems, and Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer-winning comic novel, published posthumously in 1980, following his death by suicide in 1969. It’s the first-person account of a smart, sad man who cannot tolerate the modern world and all the fools contained within it, who has only a cursory relationship to self-awareness. I read it for a while on the flight from JFK to Dublin, and later in a series of dank hostel bunks and nondescript cafes. From re-reading my notes, it seems that I was performing for myself some version of Ignatius J. Reilly, who is as poor a travel role model as one could possibly choose, and probably encouraged such observations as:

“I am annoyed at all the other passengers. Everyone is cheerful and white. I hate the cyclical behavior of an airplane ride - the group eating, cleaning up and sleeping that is so reminiscent of kindergarten or Sunday school, the forced nap, the lowest common denominator nature of the featured film, the incessant trips to the bathroom. It smells like a urinal in the whole cabin.”

On my first full day in Dublin, after a double-meat Irish breakfast and a four-hour nap, I walked to the Temple Bar neighborhood on the advice of the travel book, but I felt too shy to enter a pub alone, and I ended up in a matinee of One Fine Day, a Michelle Pfeiffer-George Clooney rom-com involving the Circle Line, multiple gigantic cell phones, and a G-rated cranberry juice bukkake scene. After the film, I forced myself into a pub, ordered a pint of Guinness and, several rounds later, found myself making out in a corner with a friendly local gentleman in a room-tone state of intoxication, whose name was Edward.

“Let’s go have a laugh,” he said, and I wanted to laugh, so I followed him to a branch of Abrakebabra, purveyor of late-night kebabs and other booze sponges, which is, according to a polished anecdote he shared with Jimmy Kimmel, Colin Farrell’s favorite Irish restaurant.

Edward had a kebab, and I had a coffee. He lived with his sister and I was living in a room full of strangers, so we reluctantly parted ways, but made a plan to meet the next morning at a pub. Incredibly, we both showed up, and after a few breakfast pints, we got on a train to Howth, a seaside village 25 minutes from the city, with a cliff walk and a sandy beach and a few places to drink and eat fried food, which is how we spent that day, with him talking and me listening to him talk, about his broken marriage and his glory days as a boxer and his current work as a house painter, his first communion and his Irish gypsy friends, his bar fights, the books and movies he liked, the IRA, a girl from Newfoundland who defended the clubbing of baby seals, and the recent death of his mother. At the end of the day, back in Dublin, he dropped me off at the hostel and said he had to work for the next several days. I gave him my copy of the Bukowski poems and never saw him again.

It’s safe to say that everything went downhill from there. Now that I’d had my magical sad Irish literate-boxer-housepainter-problem-drinker experience, I was even less inclined to make friends with the kindly clumps of Australian and New Zealander women I met in the hostel, whose sincere interest in sightseeing via tour bus left me cold.

“Hostel life so far reminds me of camp, or the first few days of college,” I wrote in my notebook. “I don’t make friends easily, and don’t have any interest in buddying up with anybody, and they probably don’t want to be friends with me, a single, sexually undesirable American woman with a bad attitude.”

I spent the next few days in Dublin, where I saw a matinee of the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts, and, at the Gaiety Theatre, a play about a nursing home, about whose playwright the Irish Times’ critic wrote, “Once again, [he] goes for the cheap laugh, peppering his script with flatulent lavatory humour and throwing in plenty of f-words to pump up the dialogue. ” At one point, a character in her late 80s re-enacted Sharon Stone’s full-frontal nude scene from Basic Instinct. I enjoyed the show, and then felt ashamed when I read the bad review. I bought a turkey and stuffing sandwich in a convenience store, and ate it while riding a train across the country to Galway, where I met a man in a park who said he could get me some hash, if I paid him up front. He took my 40 euros and did not hold up the bargain. In a pub, I listened sulkily to some live music and was joined at my table by a man who could have been my grandfather, who asked me to sneak him into my hostel bed, insisting that I would enjoy “doing the jiggy-jig” with him, but only if we used condoms. I excused myself to the bathroom and never returned.

The next day I wrote in my notebook, “Galway shits the bed. I hate tourists. I had a miserable night’s sleep thanks to some fat bitch from Ohio who snored like a fucking goat all night long, and these drunk German teenagers who kept banging in and out of the room. I want to hunt them down and press my thumbs into their skinny white throats until they stop breathing. ”

Under a gathering dark cloud of frustration and sleep deprivation, I cut the Galway portion short, returned to Dublin by train and made my way back to Howth, thinking maybe it would be nice to be alone at the beach. I booked a private room in the St. Lawrence Hotel, where middle-class Dubliners once enjoyed a bit of seaside glamour, and which has since been demolished and replaced by an apartment complex.

I got fried rice with chunks of white-fleshed fish from a Chinese takeout, and as I sat eating it alone on the seawall, a man who appeared to be in his 20s approached, told me his name was Frank, asked where I was staying and if he could spend the night with me. I lied and said I’d meet him in a certain pub. To my disappointment, I wasn’t actually up for that kind of adventure, which would probably end with me getting lightly robbed, or at least not sleeping well.

The next morning, while hiking the cliff trails, I met a businessman who scoffed when I told him I was going to Cork.

“There’s no reason to go there, ” he said. “It’s a shite city.”

“Well, that’s where my Irish family came from, so it seems like I should see it,” I said. In my cheap sneakers, my soft feet blistered from the hike, those blisters soon split and wept into my socks. The subsequent discomfort of every step reminded me of Esther’s asylum roommate Joan in the Bell Jar, undone by her bunions and forced to wear rubber boots to a job she hated.

The next morning, I took a train to Cork, where I found the slant of the watery sunlight through the gray cumulus clouds and the officious look of the buildings annoyingly similar to the central New York State places where my ancestors had put down roots in the mid-1800s, concurrent with the potato famine. I may have been squinting, but surrounded by the people of Cork, I clocked something familiar in the faces and body shapes, in the movements and gestures, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be reminded of my grim Catholic grandfather and his sisters, judgmental and rigid in their faith and expectations. I felt I was being watched by ghosts, and that what they saw was disappointing. I was sweaty and irreverent, unserious, untethered from a community of any kind, contributing little more to the world than litter and ashes. I’d been smoking so many Silk Cut cigarettes, and sleeping so poorly, that a minor head cold had blossomed into a pernicious sinus infection.

Just as in Galway, I cut it short in Cork, returned to Dublin, found a cheap hotel in which to convalesce, then put a dent in the Discover card to buy a last-minute one-way flight home, and a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I’d already read the title essay, about a disastrous cruise ship experience, when it ran in Harper’s, but I wanted it with me now, to find some solace in my disappointment.

“I’m on my way back to New York four days early, on an Aer Lingus flight, at great expense, but I feel better, mood-wise, than I’ve felt in a week, “I wrote in my notebook as we took off, and, later, “Roughly three hours into the flight and I want to kill everyone. Sitting next to me is a gigantically tall man who keeps asking for the most random shit at the wrong time, like he wanted the flight attendant selling duty-free stuff to make him a coffee. The food: rubbery chicken breast, injured carrots, a chalky roll and cheddar cheese liberally spotted with blue mold. What have I learned? The best place for most Americans is probably America. A friendly city can still get lonely. One can justify any expense to oneself in a moment of despair. Ireland is the last frontier for Americans who want to claim they’ve been to Europe without doing any of the hard work it requires. This trip was harder than I expected, and I am full of regret.”