Let’s get the disclaimer over with. I know and like Joel Magarey, but I hadn’t read more than a few advance pages of Exposure: A Journey before I bought it, and I was most keen to check it out. The good news: this is one of the most individualistic, lyrical memoirs around.
Exposure is nominally the travel tale of 22-year-old Joel, abandoning Australia, a journalist’s job and his lifelong girlfriend to inhale the extreme experiences of the globe. I’ve travelled a lot but Joel’s definition of an experience is infinitely more immersing and hazardous than this geeky conservative would ever tackle: kayaking down a remote Alaskan river, snow hiking/camping in the middle of nowhere with precious little prior experience, driving across USA, roaming over South America, etc., etc., not including regular, interlinked flashbacks to earlier startling global trips. As a travel narrative, Exposure is as skilfully plotted and evocatively written as any I’ve read. But what yanks the book off the shelf of regular travel yarns are two additional attributes.
Firstly, Exposure is in reality more about the author’s tussle with his OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), using travel as experiential therapy (though he doesn’t quite put it that way). It’s a terrifying condition and Magarey’s intimate account of its genesis, outworkings, horrors and ongoing manifestations had me gripped from the start. Some of the scenes are heart-wrenching. The plot lifts from locational drama to a darker one: will this young man survive himself? And Magarey is so candid that I felt I was inside his troubled skull.
Secondly, and as importantly, a combined existential/physical journey requires damned good writing, and this Magarey exhibits in full flight. His resume talks of poetry; well, one can see it on every page, the acute attention to every word and every rhythm. Deftly alternating humour, dread and fleeting joy, he juggles the complex narrative with ease. I revelled in every page.
The search for meaning is our most fundamental act. Exposure is a completely unexpected, illuminating memoir about just that.