A Step away from Bathing with a Toaster

Some people go to Australia to find themselves. David Kitzmiller went to Australia to find out how much finding himself was still going to cost.

A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster opens in Sydney on an unexpected weekend - and with an unexpected romance that arrives at precisely the wrong moment, which turns out to be exactly the right one. It continues across nine days at sea through some of the most beautiful water on earth, while Kitzmiller does what he has always done: pays close attention, writes down what matters, and refuses to make any of it prettier than it actually was.

This is an addiction recovery memoir and a travel memoir and something harder to name than either. The backdrop is beautiful. The writing is not about the backdrop. It is about what a person carries across an ocean - the grief and longing, the weight of past loves and the people who are gone, the depression and addiction that do not stay home just because you have booked a flight. And it is about the dark, precise humor that emerges when someone has been honest with themselves long enough to find certain things genuinely funny.

The title is not metaphorical theater. The Toaster is Kitzmiller's recurring image for the pull toward self-destruction, named with the specific dark humor that runs through everything he writes. In this book, it is the thing he is a step away from. Some days closer. Some days not. That distance is the whole story.

Woven throughout are his own poems - not as decoration or filler, but because some things need a different shape than prose to say them properly. Some of these poems say in eight lines what the surrounding chapters take pages to approach. They were not written for the book. They were written because they had to be, long before the book existed.

This is honest literary memoir for readers who do not need the hard parts softened. It is a travel memoir for readers who understand that the most interesting journey is usually the one happening inside the person watching the scenery. It is an addiction memoir that does not end neatly, written by someone still in the middle of it, told with enough precision that you will feel like you were listening rather than reading.