What’s the back story to your book?

A few years ago, I was at a book festival in downtown Minneapolis with my mom, and we were looking at a table of secondhand books. I found one called “Europe on Five Dollars a Day” that I thought was particularly absurd and hilarious. I bought it for 10 cents, initially out of ironic hilarity, a cheap conversation piece. I showed it to my mom, who thought that I’d bought it for her because she had used that guidebook in 1957. She also mentioned that she had all the letters that she and my father had exchanged while she was on that trip. I hadn’t heard about the book or the letters before. Continue reading…