Travels with My Daughter

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

In the 1970s, Niema Ash traveled to Morocco with Ronit, her teenage
daughter; Rachel, the estranged wife of poet Irving Layton and David,
their 11-year-old son; and the actress Annilee, who owned the car they
used on the journey.

The opening pages of this warm and lively travel story tell of the time
in Ronit’s childhood when her father, Shimon, ran a folk-music club in
Montreal and musicians like Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker stayed as
guests in their home; and of the travels of mother and daughter to
England and Ireland, and later to Greece, where they stayed on the
island of Lesbos with the Laytons and Leonard Cohen.

Most of the book, however, recounts the trip to Morocco after Niema and
Shimon were divorced. Ronit has now grown into a cool teenager whose
biggest problem arises when she finds herself entertaining two
boyfriends at once—a romantic Moroccan and an English buddy. Angry,
brokenhearted Rachel swears she is going to leave Layton, and unhappy
David constantly complains.

But visiting Casablanca, Marrakesh, Ketama, and Essaouira changes
everything, awakening the sensuality in all of them. They make friends,
make love, venture into the high life with a prince, and fall in love
with the country. Then Irving Layton shows up. Scott Symons, who lives
there, throws a dinner in his honor, and Cedric Smith from the Perth
County Conspiracy arrives with his guitar.

Ash’s passion for travel began in her teens when she left home to
finish school and study dance in New York. Later she completed a
master’s thesis on Yeats, so we should not be surprised that her
writing is drenched with sensuous accounts of food, fragrance, cushions,
jewelery, hashish, men’s bodies, and sex, along with some erotic and
funny stories. Accompanying the text are a few black-and-white
photographs and a map.