Muristek
Bookshelves today are full of true-life stories of marital discord but a former Observer columnist pioneered the genre 25 years ago
It’s 25 years since I accidentally turned a travel article for the Observer about a “romantic” weekend in Bruges into a niche journalistic genre – the misery travel memoir. The trip was scheduled a few days after my (spoiler alert!) soon-to-be-ex-husband had told me he was leaving me… and we went anyway. This tiny slice of misery-memoir histoire was entitled “By Waterloo Station I Sat Down and Wept”.
While the travel-article-as-anatomy-of-a-marital-breakdown sub-genre never really caught fire, the article went off to live its best life out in the journo-sphere. After reading it, I heard subsequently, plenty of people specifically booked Suite 50 at Die Swaene hotel in Bruges. For a year or so after its publication, I documented the fallout in my weekly Observer magazine column, before being commissioned to turn it all into a book, The Heart-Shaped Bullet (Picador, 1999).
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