Atlas of the Human Heart by Ariel Gore


Atlas of the Human Heart
Title : Atlas of the Human Heart
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1580050883
ISBN-10 : 9781580050883
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 333
Publication : First published April 1, 2003
Awards : Oregon Book Award Creative Nonfiction (Finalist) (2004)

Like Jack Kerouac’s intrepid little sister, Ariel Gore spins the spirited story of a vulnerable drifter who takes refuge in the recesses of the human heart. With just a few pennies and her I Ching, a change of clothes and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, a perceptive, searching Gore makes her way through the labyrinthine customs of Cold-War China, wanders bustling, electric Katmandu, and hunkers down in an icy London squat with a prostitute and a boyfriend on the dole. Yet it is in the calm, verdant landscape of rural Italy where, pregnant and penniless, nineteen-year-old Gore’s adventure truly begins. An illuminating glimpse into the boldly political Gore—creator of HipMama.com and Hip Mama magazine—this unflinching memoir offers a poignant exploration of the meaning of home, and surveys the frontiers of both land and heart.


Atlas of the Human Heart Reviews


  • treehugger

    Ok, so I JUST finished this book. JUST. Perhaps I should wait a day or 2 to post a review? But I can't stop thinking about it. This book has haunted me since I picked it up less than 2 weeks ago. I had to put it down for a little while last week - it was dragging me down a bit. But it's like a drug - I HAD to have more.

    A lot of Ariel's story pissed me off. I couldn't understand her motives (or lack thereof), I couldn't understand the incessant use of drugs and alcohol. The detached way she moved through so much of those years abroad.

    And she made me feel like a world class wimp, for although I have traveled, I have NEVER traveled like SHE traveled. (do I want to, really? I think I'm getting too old for that crap).

    But it actually DID make me want to get my old Eagle Creek pack out and get going. somewhere. anywhere less stifling than here, in the boring mundane everyday of our asleep American lives.

    And it made me want to meet this incredibly brave, strong, slightly insane woman. To see how she's done it, how she's made it out from under her heavy mantle of sadness and restlessness.

    So, while opening this book raised my blood pressure every SINGLE time I did it, I have to say, for depth, for reaching to the very core of me and pinching me there, for making me think and think and think, and for the admiration I feel for she who wrote this most honest of memoirs, this is one of the best books I have EVER read. I recommend it to anyone who would like to take a long, hard look at their lives.

    Cherie - if it weren't for you listing this on your goodreads list, I would NEVER have heard of it. So thanks ;)

  • Leslie

    When I read a memoir, I sometimes have a very hard time not judging some of the people in the book. Usually not the "bad guys", since they've already been judged--child molesters, rapists, abusive spouses, by being portrayed in a book as a "bad guy". It's the other people. In this book, the person I condemn is Ariel's mother. She pays more attention to the convicts at San Quentin that she voluteers with than her own kids, and brags that her kids thrive on neglect. I guess it's true if you call drinking, taking drugs and getting raped, all by the time you're sixteen, thriving. I don't agree. She also tells her daughter who is half the world away to call after eight on Sunday nights, so "we don't miss Andy Rooney."

    But I know the purpose of a memoir is not to elicit contempt for people, but understanding of the person who wrote the book and what happens to him or her and why that person does what he or she does and to let that person touch my soul with her soul, even though we will never meet. So I will shut up about Ariel's mom--if possible.

    When Ariel is 16, she runs away from a major case of angst, exacerbated by getting raped, among other things, and slips out of the unobservant gaze of her mother and goes to China. Alone. And she does amazingly well, actually. I was surprised how long she went before awful things happened. She wandered around China, Tibet, and other countries in the far East. After a lot of amazing experiences, things do start falling apart and she goes to Europe, where her life gets worse. Ariel ends up with an abusive man and pregnant.

    She finally goes home. Thank God! And Mom even came to Italy to try and take Ariel home. I didn't see that coming.

    The writing in this book is so good. The way Ariel Gore uses words blows me away. I don't think I'll forget the phrase "dread-tinged hope for a new life" anytime soon.

    I felt on edge while I was reading, it just seemed so inevitable that something terrible would happen to the 16, then 17, then 18 year old girl wandering the world alone.

    And don't skip the acknowledgements. Gore tells about her life after the years covered in the book and how her memoir came to be written and published.

    I'm really glad I read this book, and after I finished, I hid my daughter's passport.

  • sharon

    "The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness."

    "When you leave a place, it's best if it's raining. Not pouring, but not just drizzling either. You want fat drops that fall on your cheeks like tears. IT's best if it's early, too, the tail lights and porch lights and streetlights and station lights all begging you to stay just one more day.

    When you leave a place, it's best if you're hungry. A girl should never travel on a full stomach. It's best if you're tired, too, still wrapped in the dreams of sleep, oblivious to gravity and the heaviness of your own body.

    When you leave a place, it's best to take as little as possible - ideally a single change of clothes, the jewelry on your body, the money in your pickets, memories safely stowed in your secure imagination. Never pack more than you can comfortable carry across the Himalayas on foot, because you never know where a road will take you. It's best not to bring along anything you care about, either. You'll lose it anyway. Give it away before you go.

    And when you leave a place, it's best not to cry. If everything is as it should be, the sky will do your crying for you."

  • Elizabeth Bedlam

    Best memoir ive ever read

  • Karen Mo

    i think books come to you when you need them & i needed ariel gores story just now. so it was perfect

  • Bex

    This is one of those books where Goodreads review stars don't work- on one hand this was a great book. The writing wasn't spectacular, it definitely needed some serious editing, etc- but it kind of sticks with you. So, in a way, it was a great book.

    Things I liked: The actual stories about her Asian adventures. I found myself yearning to know more about many of the people she so causally met and then left. Those crazy punk rockers in China? All hands in on that story- but there wasn't anything more to it. She got them some Us clothes and they taught her a game.

    Things that made me loathe the book: Ariel herself. I know that sounds really harsh, but hear me out. It is a memoir, so the book is actually telling me to learn about the author- what is going on in her head when these things happened. This is personal- it is like making a friend, journeying with them and then going your separate way once the story if over. Do you still want to know about that friend? DO you wonder what they are up to? Do you even still care about their story?

    I can't stand 16 year old Ariel. (Or 19 year old Ariel for that matter). I have no compassion for someone who comes from so much privilege and lives like this. Was she suffering from depression? I don't know- if that were the case I could feel some kind of empathy. I could cheer her on from adventure to adventure. All I read about was a kid who couldn't see her own life for what it was- white privilege. And then she went on a hell of a drug addled adventure, hurting people (including herself) on the way to maybe find herself at the end. Which only read like an escape from her miserable situation. I know people who should be this effed up- who lived in squalor as children, who were abused by their parents, a neighbor, a coach, who lived in the foster system, who were refugees from places like Cambodia in the PolPot era, from Vietnam post war, from the former USSR. I have friends who were adopted, who lost parents to cancer/car accidents/agent orange, who lost siblings, who were paralyzed before they became teenagers- none of them are this messed up. They suffer from depression, anxiety- but they aren't running away. They aren't passive observers in their own life. They are living it- they feel pain and then deal with it.

    So- I hate this book and love it. Why? Because I both hate Ariel and in a way love her even though I cannot possibly understand her. I can't imagine passing this one onto someone else- but never say never.

    (Also, I have never read anything else by Gore. This book did not turn me off from her style or her other books. )

  • DoctorM

    Funny, sad, poignant, maddening. Ariel Gore at sixteen ran off to China with a backpack and a few hundred dollars. She managed to get from Hong Kong to Beijing, Beijing to Tibet and Nepal, then to Amsterdam and London and Tuscany. She came home at nineteen or twenty with a daughter she delivered herself. I have to admire her courage and resourcefulness, but her memoir does have its scarier side--- a fair number of Very Bad Things happen to Gore. And it's easy to be frustrated with her--- her passivity and her disconnectedness. Still..."Atlas of the Human Heart" is an expat memoir that is worth reading, and a reminder of the sheer breadth of the world, a reminder that the road is still open to new lives, even if there are Scary Things out there.

  • Jenn

    Kind of grating and pretentious, yet it was fun to read about her travels.

  • Hollie Rose

    (Review written in 2003)
    I loved this memoir! This book was everything I most enjoy in a memoir. It was well written, told the story of a young traveling (lost) girl, and in amongst the stories of what happened are interspersed excerpts from books she's reading or things she's learned, that apply to how she is seeing and living her days. Another brilliant touch was to quote different sources both ancient and modern, about the workings of the human heart - those quotes juxtaposed against her experiences. In China she picks up the name Ghost Girl and carries it with her until she begins to find herself, then she tells her boyfriend one day "Call me Ariel."

    page 73 -
    I lit a cigarette.
    "What are you grieving?" Vincent wanted to know…
    "Grieving?"
    Vincent nodded. "In Chinese medicine we understand that if you are grieving but cannot shed sufficient tears, you will crave heat on your lungs. That is why so many Chinese smoke. They are grieving, but they cannot cry."

    page 274
    Forgetting is a deliberate act. We cut and splice the footage of our lives, keeping what we think we need, discarding scenes, rewriting lines, smoothing over transitions, representing whole seasons with montages or jump cuts, editing out characters and complexities at will. '


  • Noelle

    "I had a choice: I could stay home and die young - keep on dying - or I could fly away to someplace completely foreign where I knew no one and where maybe I could figure out what was me and what was geography, what was me and what was circumstance."

    Traveling to find oneself isn't a new idea, but Ariel Gore's story is more unique than most. When she was 16, she left California with a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, and then spent the next three years living throughout Asia and Europe. She tells some pretty fantastic travel stories, including tales of her stint as a smuggler, her experience as an amateur actress in Kathmandu, and the odd sensation of realizing that she herself was the biggest freak at a Chinese circus. For a little while, her travel tales and her reflective, lyrical writing had me wondering if this was by one of the authors of Off the Map, another travelogue written with a reflective style and episodic structure, by two young women with a punk aesthetic and anarchist politics. I soon realized I was wrong, which makes sense, because there is a major difference between the two books -- the authors of Off the Map revel in the beauty of travel and discovery, while there is very little joy to be found in Ariel Gore's writing. This book is a very honest and restrained look back at what seems to have been a very dark time in the author's life. She seems very detached from her experiences, and it's clear throughout the book that as she traveled, she spiraled more deeply into depression (though there is somewhat of a "happy ending").

    Ariel Gore is a gifted writer, and I enjoyed her perceptive and subdued writing style, but there were times when her metaphors seemed contrived. I like the central metaphor of the book, the idea that she is traveling across her own heart (hence the title), but I don't think anything was added by the bits - brief, anatomical descriptions of the heart and its functions - that appeared at the beginning of each of the book's five parts.


  • Elyssa

    I almost gave up on this book, but I am glad I stayed with it. The beginning of the book, where Ariel Gore describes her high school angst, was cringe-inducing. Her prose was melodramatic, pretentious, and overwrought. It was like reading page after page of bad teenage poetry.

    After she leaves high school and Palo Alto and chooses to spend the remainder of adolescence
    on the road in Asia and Europe, the book takes a huge turn for the better. The occasional annoying prose pops up periodically, but mostly she chooses a more straightforward and sparse storytelling style.

    Her travel memoirs are amazing and I felt grateful that she shared her story. I admired her bravery to travel with no concrete itinerary and very little money. She trusted her fate and the I Ching and learned a lot about herself and others.

    The culmination of the story is powerful and I won't give it away in case others choose to read the book.

  • Allison Floyd

    GUTGed at page 26, which yes, I realize, is grossly unfair, but what can I say? I didn't make that initial connection with the material, and experience has taught me that when this is the case right off the bat, it tends not to change when I slog all the way through something.

    It's a shame—having just read and thoroughly enjoyed Gore's self-help book for writers, which was my introduction to her, I was looking forward to this one. Maybe it's the glut of memoirs in the same vein that I've already read. Maybe it's the whole heart/blood conceit—blood is gross, dude, and I don’t want to think of gallons of the stuff being pumped through my body. Maybe it's because I was a weirdo and more or less boycotted adolescence and therefore can't relate. Maybe it's just for no good reason at all.

    Whatever the case may be, it's time to free up the ol' dance card, alas.

  • Sabrina Rutter

    I admire Ariel Gore's bravery. Yes I said bravery. I don't know to many people, myslef included that would be willing to truelly embrace their freedom the way Ariel does. I like my comfy little apartment and knowing where all the roads in my little city will take me. This place is my home, for Ariel her body is her home and I do admire that!This is now one of my favorite memoirs! I really had no idea the adventure I was going to take when I picked this book up. My only problem with this book is that I wish I had read it sooner!
    I don't want to give anything away in this review other than the fact that this is probably one of the best memoirs ever written!

  • Antonia Crane

    Ariel Gore twists and curves into tunnels as a nice girl from Palo Alto. The book begins slowly and cautiously. At first, I wasn't sure why she had such itchy feet, but her map of the heart kept her lurching onto planes, destination unknown. Just as in love. She is stateless and ungrounded and raging with innocence and hunger as she crosses borders, smuggles drugs to feed her pregnant friend and collects lovers and spirits like patches sewn on a ratty denim vest. Her prose swings wildly from gorgeous and poetic to crisp and raw. As in the Wizard of Oz, our Dorothy does end up home with a baby. It's no Disney ending, but it is heartfelt and bone true.

  • tamarack

    i wish i could just keep reading this book - living in it. reading it feels like traveling, the writing is so alive. the book is officially in 5 parts but it feels to me like 3 eras with clear turning points and finishes off on a fourth big change (i won't give away the twists and turns). i still love this book in my third reading of it, but my favorite chapters are while gore is in asia (china, hong kong, tibet and nepal). maybe i'm so enthralled because i've never been to these countries; but maybe it's because ariel gore is a fucking unbelievable author.

  • Julie

    It took me a few days to decide if I liked this book. Often those kinds of books end up being my favorite. The story line wasn't my top pick but I ended up enjoying the read. It was one of the most quotable books I have read in awhile:
    "The brain, the skin, the lungs and the heart make up our vital organs. We are made to think and feel and breathe and love. The rest is optional."

    "For every person there is a unique tragedy. Mine is no more grievous than yours or anyone elses."

    I could go on and on. Any book that can give you 10 quotes of the day is worth reading.

  • Juliette

    Crazy memoir about a teenager who drops out of high school and moves to communist China in the 1980's. She ends up going to Tibet, Kathmandu, Holland, and Italy, too. Sad and sweet travel stories with insight on adolescence are combined to create the mood. I wasn't too crazy about her "unassigned readings" and frequent definition of words and their roots, and the editing wasn't great. However, it was an engaging and quick read. Reminded me of Ayun Halliday's "No Touch Monkey", but less hippy-dippy.

  • Lynn

    Loved this book.. if I ever have a daughter and she likes to read, this book will be encouraged. It was tough for me in the beginning to get past her "high school days".. of just floating, but I can also relate with memories of my own. Overall... I loved this book because I too long to travel and live in different worlds.. often believing this will truly make me happy and my life complete. Perhaps my own happiness starts with me wherever I may be instead. I loved her remark about home possibly being the soles of your own feet... A must read for any wandering spirits!

  • Christine Way

    I bought this book for 25 cents at the Mckinleyville Friends of the Library book sale, so that I found it mediocre isn't too much of a loss. I was initially intrigued because the memior is based on her travels to China and other exotic destinations. I enjoy travel memiors, just not this one. It read more like a teenage diary with lots a bad poetry and choppy writing. I always thought it was extremely difficult to get a book published if you weren't an already established author, but maybe the internet has changed all of that.

  • camilla

    There were points where Gore's character really frustrated me. But then I would remember she was only 16 or 17 and it became much more understandable. It's basically the story of a girl who leaves California in her late teens to travel the world. She makes her way through Asia in Europe, sleeping in hostels or the street, making friends in bars and squats. The text is beautiful, it made me want to drop everything and have the road be my home for awhile.

  • tee

    3.5 Really did like it but travel memoirs aren't my thing. Read it because Gore seems like the type of radical person who might make a travel memoir a bearable thing and that she did. Definitely a five star book for anyone with a love of broke-arse travel, squatting, and being lost, naive but tough as shit.

    Can't wait to read her new one,
    The End of Eve: A Memoir.

  • Theresa

    A Gen-Xer from Palo Alto, the narrator departs Palo Alto, heading for China at the age of 16, having lied to her parents about her acceptance to the Beijing Language Institute. Pulled along by something in her pumping heart, she bounces through the east and into Europe with her I Ching, passport and little else.

  • Lauren

    Inspiring memoir from local Portland writer/editor magnifique Ariel Gore. The book begins in 1980s Palo Alto, where the teen-aged Gore is beginning to feel lost and out of touch with her own life and body. She embarks on solo trip, beginning in pre-Tiannamen Square China and travels to Nepal, England and then finally Italy. A stirring and very truthful book, and I couldn't put it down!

  • Libby T


    I took a memoir class with Ariel, who happened to live down the street from me in PDX at the time. She is very much the revolutionary mama her fans claim her to be. This book is a beautifully written story of her young sloppy and dangerous heart-breaking adventures around the globe. When I was this age I thought of myself like this character, only less gutsy. Well, maybe just a little less.

  • Sian Jones

    The arbitrary title doesn't apply, and the attempts to wedge in material related to the arbitrary title are, for the most part, awkward and unnecessary because this memoir is striking, human, heartbreaking, and deeply honest, and it needs no arbitrary frame. It's the genuine article, a lived life being described with precision and compassion.