Laurie Gough

Laurie Gough is a Canadian memoirist, travel writer, and essayist whose work connects journeys with questions of belonging and identity. Kiss The Sunset Pig recounts a drive from Ontario to California while revisiting earlier travels in Sumatra, the Yukon, Greece, Korea, Thailand, and Jamaica. Penguin Canada published the book in 2006, and its road-trip structure allows present movement to alternate with memories of a more restless earlier life. Gough's other travel memoir appeared as Island of the Human Heart in Canada and Kite Strings of the Southern Cross elsewhere; it was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She later wrote Stolen Child, a family memoir about her son's obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her essays and travel pieces have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies, including work for the Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, and Salon. In Kiss The Sunset Pig, humour and self-questioning keep the landscape from becoming simple scenery, making the search for a remembered coastal cave part of a larger meditation on home.