KEY POINTS:
Renowned travel writer Bill Bryson promised his wife he wouldn't leave the house when he wrote his most recent book.
The outcome was a trip down memory lane and a book about his life growing up in the 1950's in Des Moines, Iowa, in the American Midwest.
"I
thought I could write about myself and someplace I had been to already. I really wanted to work on a book that would be simple and more fun," he told NZPA in Wellington today.
Bryson is touring the country promoting The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, in which he writes of his childhood and American culture.
"I was fascinated by the fact that the 50's, when you look back was a time of great unhappiness in the wide world. There was the cold war and there was polio, which was a really scary disease.
"And yet, for me in my own childhood, it was perfectly idyllic. So I wanted to explore that."
Bryson is a softly spoken unassuming man who, despite his popularity worldwide, is very rarely recognised -- and had previously noted that he was invisible to everyone except dogs and Jehovah's Witnesses.
"I'm kind of amazed sometimes at how little name recognition there is -- that when I check into a hotel almost never do they know me.
"You think they'd be a little more nervous to have a travel writer staying there. I've always tried to go incognito, and it's really not that hard to do."
Bryson's career as a writer began as a finance reporter -- a job that he fell into "by accident".
"It wasn't because I had a particular aptitude for finance, it was just the job that came up."
It was his sports writing father who ignited a passion for the craft.
"My dad was very influential to me, partly because of his sense of humour -- he was very, very funny -- and partly because he was a really good and disciplined writer.
"And I learned habits from him and the whole attitude towards writing, which was that if you are going to do it, you better take it seriously and do your best.
"I watched him agonise over things, so I had a sense of what it was to write."
When Bryson started looking at travel writing as a career, he didn't have a set plan for how to go about it.
"But it seems that one of the things I've been doing is the English-speaking world and I really want to do Canada and New Zealand in particular."
Bryson said he had only visited New Zealand on book promotion tours, so had not seen much of the country in a relaxed way.
"And I would love to come back and do that. If only for selfish reasons -- I've never come to New Zealand just for fun."
Countries that were not on his list of places to write about were less secure ones, such as those in the Middle East -- mostly because it was difficult to poke fun at them.
"The problem isn't so much personal security -- although that could be an issue -- the problem is what could I write about these places?"
He said it would be difficult to get good jokes from that kind of travelling.
"I'm very happy to make fun of Australia or America or Germany -- the big countries that can take it.
"But if you go to a place where people are really struggling or feel really strongly about religious issues and you start making wisecracks, it can be misconstrued."
So much of the world was closed off to him, he said.
"Essentially you need a rich, comfortable prosperous country to write about."
That's not to say he hasn't offended people in those rich countries with his writing.
Bryson holds the unusual distinction of being given a lifetime ban from a major mall in Des Moines after a local newspaper picked up on a paragraph in his first book The Lost Continent about fat women who wandered the mall.
"It was a strange thing," he said.
"I've never been banned from a commercial premises before."
Bryson said his writing should never be taken seriously, and if he did choose to write about a place, it was because he had genuine affection and admiration for it.
"Most of it is good-natured teasing."
He said the topics his books covered were not extraordinary -- "just what I ate, what I saw and encountered".
He avoided "exotic and professional" travelling and preferred normal travelling experiences most people had.
"The frustrations of not ever being quite sure if you're on the right train or not -- that is an anxiety that all travellers face.
"Or you're in a foreign country and you can't even read the alphabet," he said.
"So it's just the normal kind of things."
Which could explain why his books struck a chord with readers, he said.
- NZPA
