Rash: A Memoir

De: Lisa Kusel

Narrado por: Hollis Welsh

Writer Lisa Kusel, while living comfortably in her California home, feels an unsettling lack of personal contentment. When she sees a job posting for a new international school in Bali, she convinces her schoolteacher husband, Victor, to apply.

Six weeks after his interview, Lisa, Victor, and their six-year-old daughter, Loy, move halfway around the world to paradise. But instead of luxuriating in ocean breezes, renewed passion, and first-rate schooling, what Lisa and her family find are burning corpses, biting ants, and a millionaire founder who cares more about selling bamboo furniture than educating young minds. Not to mention Lisa's fear that, one morning, she might see the dengue fever rash on her young daughter.

Rash is an unfiltered, sharply written memoir about a woman who goes looking for happiness on the Island of the Gods and nearly destroys her marriage in the process. For anyone who has ever dreamed of starting over in an exotic locale, this is a poignant reminder that no matter where you go, there you are.

©2017 Lisa Kusel (P)2019 Lisa Kusel

Stressful Trips R Us

I feel an inexplicable kinship with Kusel. I like her sense of humor, and I relate (much) too closely to her frenetic pace, anxiety, and curiosity. I wanted to stop her from going on the trip right from the beginning; I knew it was going to be what but was. But she did it, by God! Kusel and her family bought the ticket and sailed into a manufactured ideal of “Bali” with a kind of optimism that conmen and shisters dream about walking into their lairs and webby dens.

I want to say I loved reading this because I admire the courage of this writer, but the truth is I could barely watch as paradise disintegrated into ants, disease-carrying mosquitoes, broken bamboo, and buckets of sweat covered in mold. Where “Eat, Pray, Love” made me want to hurl Gilbert’s book out the window for its saccharine, cloying aftertaste, Kusel’s portrait of the underside of paradise’s log was equally excruciating for different reasons. Definitely Heart of Darkness stuff.

The idealists and the capitalists are turned out in this memoir, and I think that is its greatest strength. She reveals plenty of little moments of appreciation that I admired, but the overall balance tipped more toward yikes (for me). While Victor and Lisa said they’d do it again, I still reside in camp “Hell No, Please Don’t Go.”

Kusel would make an excellent suspense writer. She has a great sense of timing, and she can build tension like a pro. The problem with the non-fiction is that some of that delicious suspense has nowhere to go because the narrative must stick to the truth. The tame, tidy, truthful ending. To be fair: I’m so glad her life got that ending, but I feel like there were too many villains left unpunished!

File Under: Stressful af: A Memoir

Terrible

This book represents everything wrong with Americans! I have never heard such ethnocentric selfishness! Poor Bali!