Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust

At first, Ulli gives in: although she takes little pleasure in sex, she seems to think of it as a necessary component of her rebellious new life. On almost every page, she is set upon by men who tell her she has beautiful eyes and expect sex in return for the unwanted compliment. Of course, danger still lurks, and Ulli becomes something of a latter-day Little Red Riding Hood besieged by wolves, particularly after she leaves Rome for Italy’s less-traveled regions. Now I’m finally experiencing something myself!” This is all new for Ulli, and it seems like she is on the brink of self-discovery: Midway through her travels she tells a fellow wanderer, “For the longest time I’ve felt that everything I know I know only from books. Her early experiences, rendered in shades of black and pale green, include bumming rides from strangers, hanging around Rome’s Spanish Steps with fellow punks (and sleeping in the park above them), panhandling (the Romans, she finds, are quite generous, because “the contrast between rich and poor is so huge…it’s considered common courtesy to give an alm”), and seeing an ecstatic Clash concert. Their situation is precarious: “Two 17-year-old girls hitchhiking to Italy-a country which I only knew from book and movies-with just a sleeping bag-a blanket, no spare clothes, no money, no papers.”Īnd they love it: “We felt like global explorers!!!” Ulli writes in her travel diary. Lacking the proper documents, the girls make their way to Italy surreptitiously. What she wants is to escape the boredom of bourgeois Austrian life and do as she pleases, “not what someone is telling to do.” And so, in the winter of 1984, she takes off for Italy with a girl named Edi, a nymphomaniac with no intuition or discernment. When Ulli, a punked-out and disaffected seventeen-year-old from a middle-class Viennese family, sets off on her trip, she doesn’t have a particular destination in mind. Ulli Lust’s graphic memoir of the time she spent hitchhiking and otherwise relying on the kindness of strangers in Austria and Italy makes little pretense of caring about the locales. A travelogue is ultimately a coming-of-age story with its thumb stuck out. The real story being told has to with the self and its tentative steps into some great unknown. Call it the travelogue paradox: In books that purport to be about the perils and pleasures of life on the road, travel itself is typically no more than pretext.

Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust