She meets Liliane, an unusual French woman who takes her out for dinners and influences her newfound fashion sense. As much as she claims she wants to spend her time alone, discovering independence, she spends the majority of her time seeking out friendships. However Steinbach does not have the journey she intended. She has the quintessential Parisian experience. She sees fabulous architecture, eats delicious food, has good wine and meets interesting people. Her journalist's eye for detail is noted and appreciated while she is relaying her experiences. Steinbach takes the reader on a guided tour of Paris, frequenting small cafés and unknown restaurants as well as some major landmarks, such as the Champs Elysées and the Louvre.

As such, Steinbach rents a small flat and proceeds to explore her new surroundings and herself. She imagines a metamorphosis of self a year in which she will become a different woman entirely. She envisions the trip as a journey of independence, in which she will attempt to understand what it truly means to be a woman in the middle phase of her life, her children now grown and gone, and herself divorced. Without Reservations is a travel memoir by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Alice Steinbach, detailing her yearlong travels throughout Europe as a self-proclaimed 'independent woman.'ĭeciding she needs a drastic change in her life, Steinbach takes a leave of absence from her job as a journalist to move to France.

Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman Who am I, she wanted to know, away from the things that define me - my family, children, job, friends? Steinbach searches for the answer in some of the most exciting places in the world: Paris, where she finds a soulmate in a Japanese man Oxford, where she learns more from a ballroom dancing lesson than any of her studies Milan, where she befriends a young woman about to be married.īeautifully illustrated with postcards Steinbach wrote home to herself, Without Reservations is an unforgettable voyage of discovery.Review | Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach 'I had fallen into the habit – of defining myself in terms of who I was to other people and what they expected of me.' 'For years I'd made my own choices, paid my own bills, shovelled my own snow, and had relationships that allowed for a lot of freedom on both sides.' Slowly, however, she saw that she had become quite dependent in another way. 'In many ways, I was an independent woman,' writes Alice Steinbach, single working mother and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. Without Reservations is about a woman's dream come true – taking a year off to travel the world and rediscover what it is like to be an independent woman, without ties and without reservations.

Without reservations by alice steinbach