Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother's) Lifetime

Written by Maggie Downs

Narrated by Rachel Fulginiti

At age 34, newly married and established in her career as an award-winning newspaper journalist, Maggie Downs quits her job, sells her belongings, and embarks on the solo trip of a lifetime: Her mother’s.

As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. “You are braver than you think,” her mother always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries―visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, could not visit herself―encountering some of the world’s most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother. Interweaving travelogue with family memories, Braver Than You Think takes the reader hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, white-water rafting on the Nile, volunteering at a monkey sanctuary in Bolivia, praying at an ashram in India, and fleeing the Arab Spring in Egypt.

By embarking on an international journey, Downs learned to make every moment count―traveling around the globe and home again, losing a parent while discovering the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781713521877

Maggie Downs

MAGGIE DOWNS is an award-winning writer based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Palm Springs Life, and McSweeney’s and has been anthologized in The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True Stories from the World’s Best Writers and Best Women’s Travel Writing. Braver Than You Think is her first book. Find out more at maggiedowns.com.

Reviews for Braver Than You Think

[misslissa23 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I fell in love with this book instantly. There are parts of Maggie’s journey that instantly grabbed me. A Midwestern girl with a German mother (mine once removed), a Vietnam War Vet Dad, the National Geographic Magazines and the influence they had, etc. I went to college to be an Anthropologist, but after college I followed a boy instead of my dreams of travel/ grad school. My life today is happy (different boy), but I love to read books like this where someone did what I wasn’t brave enough to do. Thank you Maggie, you gave me several days away from this pandemic and away from the suburbs to places that I too looked at in magazines with my mom and now look at with my one and only son. Such a great book!

[nyiper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I just plain LOVED this book!!!! Maggie Downs writes SO beautifully of her incredible year long trek around the world. Yes, she is a journalist but this is such a personal book. The Epilogue was especially meaningful, coming full circle for the reader. I was in tears with her description of visiting an Elephant Rescue service to volunteer in 2010/2011---and yet here she was, with her young son and husband in 2018----at that same place as visitors. I was delighted to see that Thailand had improved so many things in the years since she was there. It's a wonderful book to read to see how much one person can change and wonder.....how many of us could DO that? She sets a wonderful example for young people.