Orange Prize-winner Lionel Shriver recalls her best summer - a solo cycling expedition around Europe
Not many people would reminisce about getting drenched to the skin and chilled to the bone, about getting lost and getting lonely, about blinding exhaustion and biting black flies, but I have a perverse streak a mile wide. In 1985 I was one of perhaps tens of thousands of unpublished fiction writers in New York city. Living on raw carrots and rotgut bourbon, I had managed to hoard enough money to light off for Europe with a bicycle by the name of Zefal. Just before my departure, a slightly loopy literary agent had reluctantly agreed to represent my first novel. I was 28 years old. I did not realise that I was still very young, which may be definitive of being 28 years old.
In those days cross-country cycling trips were not quite trite, though they would soon become so, to my annoyance. At least this was before the advent of posh package-holiday group cycles from one Michelin-starred restaurant to another. With Let's Go Europe and a youth-hostel guide, I went by myself. In retrospect, for a young woman to be biking solo in often deserted countryside was probably dangerous, but one of the delights of being young is being stupid.
I travelled 6,500km, averaging 150km a day. That may sound boastful, but if you'd ridden that far in frequently appalling conditions, you'd wear your mileage on your sleeve, too. Suffering recalled in tranquillity is painless, of course, so 20 years later I can breezily submit that 1985's was the most magnificent summer of my life.
When I recall those months, they come at me in pastiche.
IIreland, cycling to the Cliffs of Moher, I was bucketed on so hard, for so long, getting so wet and so cold, that by the time I made it to the visitors' centre I couldn't be arsed to walk a whole 100 metres to look at the bloody cliffs.
One late afternoon in the Rhône Valley, I reached a hostel at which I might have remained. But I'd only travelled 100km that day, and another hostel was listed 50km down the road. I blame the fact that The Eagles' Hotel California came on the radio at that moment, inspiring an irrational ebullience. So I kept going - only to find that the second hostel had closed. With a tail light whose batteries were shot, I about-faced and retraced the whole 50km back to the first hostel in pitch dark, lorries whooshing centimetres from my elbow. I have never much liked The Eagles since.
As I battled the worst headwind of the trip along a desolate stretch in Scotland, a cyclist whizzing in the opposite direction - at about 150km/h, and he wasn't even pedalling - cried gaily: "Turn around!" Turning around would not get me to the ferry in Stranraer. In the middle of the next uphill slog, Zefal refused to go any farther, like one of those parched horses in westerns that you whip one more time before it keels over dead. Standing over the inert carcass, I started to cry. I got back on, of course - I hadn't any choice - but that moment of simply coming to a halt in the middle of nowhere has become a touchstone of sorts, a reminder that I have limits. I missed the ferry, checked into a B&B and slept for 12 hours straight.
Phoning my agent from a tiny village in Spain, stuffing a kilo of pesetas into a dicey phone box, I made out over a crackling connection that Random House wanted to buy my first novel. That night I cried, too - as you do when you get what you think you've always wanted, which instils not only exhilaration but also anxiety. Yet most of all I cried because, if the rest of my life was about to begin, my cycling trip was over. My agent had ordered me home to begin revisions for my new editor right away. I must have had a dim presentiment of the years of plopping dumpily in front of a computer screen that would constitute the abundance of my time thereafter. I'd get out of the rain, all right. But my life would be dry in more than one sense.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Serpent's Tail, £9.99), Lionel Shriver's seventh novel, has just won this year's Orange Prize for Fiction