Escaping into Life

It was sleeting in Knoxville when Linda Gambill decided to leave Tennessee. She was 24, smoking marijuana every night, stuck in an unfulfilling job and an unhappy relationship with a former professor. Her friends were getting married or moving away. Gambill wanted something else: “to be in charge of my life, traveling the globe and helping others and meeting fascinating people who found me fascinating.” So, she joined the Peace Corps.

That decision sends Gambill halfway around the world in The Geography of Desire: A Memoir of West Africa, her vivid and often surprising account of the two years she spent in The Gambia beginning in 1979.

The book is less a conventional Peace Corps adventure than a coming-of-age story about the complicated business of becoming oneself. Gambill goes to Africa believing she might help other people. She discovers, gradually and sometimes painfully, that she is the one who needs to learn how to see the world differently.

Gambill grew up in Oak Ridge, one of the secret cities created during World War II to develop the atomic bomb. Her departure for Africa is therefore not simply geographical. She is leaving a particular Southern world and the expectations she associates with it. The contrast could hardly be more dramatic. In The Gambia, she is assigned to Medina, a devout Muslim village where she is supposed to teach women about health and nutrition. Instead of being welcomed as the enlightened American who has come to improve village life, she finds herself lonely, depressed, culturally bewildered, and largely ineffective.

Her first instinct is to retreat. Gambill is candid about how poorly prepared she was for life in rural West Africa. She struggles with the heat, isolation, language barriers, unfamiliar customs, and the enormous gulf between what she imagined service would look like and what it actually requires. Her discomfort is not presented as noble suffering. Gambill allows her younger self to be needy, naïve, judgmental, frightened, and sometimes self-absorbed.

That honesty gives the memoir gravity.

The turning point comes with tragedy. A child Gambill is trying to help dies, and the experience forces her to reconsider what it means to be useful. Gradually, she stops trying to impose her own solutions and begins listening. She learns the Wolof language, develops friendships with village residents, and works with women to establish a garden. The process is incremental, which makes it more compelling than the sudden epiphanies common to inspirational travel narratives.

Gambill is equally frank about another kind of education: desire. Two very different men become important figures in her life, and the romantic and sexual relationships she describes complicate her understanding of herself and the culture around her. These passages are neither gratuitous nor coy. Gambill recognizes that sexuality, like service, is entangled with power, culture, loneliness, and the desire to belong. The result is a memoir considerably more intimate than the familiar Peace Corps narrative of hardship, idealism, and good intentions.

The book’s title points toward its larger subject. Desire, Gambill suggests, is a kind of compass, though not necessarily a reliable one. It propels us toward places and people without telling us what we will find when we arrive. “Desire is a strange beast,” she writes, “always wanting what it cannot have.” In Gambill’s case, the desire to escape Tennessee becomes the means by which she eventually learns how deeply she remains connected to home.

That tension gives the book its emotional architecture. The Gambia is never simply an exotic backdrop, and Tennessee is not just a place she had to flee. Gambill’s return to the village many years later adds another layer to the story, allowing her to encounter both the place and the young woman she once was with the perspective of time. The past becomes something she can revisit but never quite recover.

Gambill’s background as a photographer is evident in her prose. She has an eye for light, color, landscape, gesture, and the small physical details that make a place memorable. Her writing can be plainspoken and conversational before suddenly becoming lyrical. The memoir also incorporates historical and cultural research, giving readers context for the political and social realities surrounding her personal story.

At times, the accumulation of detail and reflection slows the narrative, and the memoir’s willingness to linger in its narrator’s emotional turbulence may test readers’ patience. But that excess is also part of Gambill’s project. She is not only reconstructing an adventure; she is understanding the person who lived it.

That distinction matters. This book is ultimately less interested in the Africa Gambill went looking for than in the self she discovered there. The young woman who arrives in Medina wants to matter, to escape the confines of her old life, do something meaningful, and fall in love. She gets some of what she wants although rarely in the form she expects.

One achievement of the memoir is that Gambill does not make her younger self wiser than she was. She lets her make mistakes. Decades later, she looks back without condemning or romanticizing her.

For a book that begins with a woman standing in the cold, dreaming of somewhere else, The Geography of Desire demonstrates the complicated value of going away. Sometimes we leave home because we cannot yet see how to become ourselves there. Sometimes we have to cross the world to discover what we were carrying with us all along. And sometimes, as in Gambill’s narrative, the place we set out to remake remakes us instead.