Holly Fitzgerald: Lost in the Jungle Again

In February of 1973, Holly Fitzgerald and her husband, Fitz, left the United States to embark on a yearlong honeymoon across South America. Their plan was to backpack across Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, filing travel stories for a Connecticut newspaper. Five months into their trip, when their plane crash-landed into a Peruvian penal colony, their quest for adventure took a very different turn. Ruthless River tells the story of the twenty-six days that Fitzgerald and her husband were stranded on a raft on the Madre de Dios River, largely without food or water, unable to swim to safety or to call for help. As their journey becomes increasingly dangerous and their physical safety ever more precarious, Fitzgerald offers a poignant portrait of a young marriage and a meditation on the human will to survive.

I first saw Fitzgerald tell the story of this harrowing ordeal at a standing-room-only book event near her home in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. There is something wonderfully incongruous about watching Fitzgerald, an elegant lady in her early 70s, tell the story of how she survived a plane crash, fled a penal colony, and then convinced her husband to help her make a raft out of logs in order to navigate five hundred miles down the mighty Madre de Dios river.

Fitzgerald and I met to discuss her writing process at her home, where the shelves are filled with objects from her travels