Jane Christmas brings a humorous twist to the travel writing genre. Her two previous books—The Pelee Project: One Woman’s Escape from Urban Madness, and What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim: A Midlife Misadventure on Spain’s Camino de Santiago de Compostela—both Canadian bestsellers, reveal a fresh, audacious voice that has drawn comparisons to Bill Bryson, Nora Ephron and Anne Lamott.

Christmas is a kinetic individual with middle-age wanderlust. One minute she’s leading the reader by the hand into prickly emotional territory, the next minute she is in the midst of a social situation that has readers laughing out loud. Readers identify with her sentiments and her predicaments, and that has earned Christmas a devoted international following.

She doesn’t intentionally try to be funny. Christmas says it is her readers’ recognition of themselves in some of the situations she writes about that gets them giggling. “It’s a universal sense of simpatico,” says Christmas.

Also universal is the simple desire to escape and connect with our authentic selves.

“When we travel,” says Christmas, “we take two journeys simultaneously; the physical one with all its attendant chaos of missed flights, rattled nerves, frantic packing and rigid itineraries; and the parallel journey, the one that confronts our fears and desires—be it snakes, unpredictable traveling companions, the irreplaceable comforts of home, motherhood, or the realization that home is not where your heart is. Traveling opens us to new cultures and destinations but it also opens us up to ourselves. We think about things when we’re traveling that we don’t tend to think about at home, humorous things and melancholy things. We also tend to be bolder and less inhibited than we are at home—and that can be a bit of an eye-opener!”

Incontinent on the Continent, Christmas’s latest book, recounts her travels with her mother in Italy.

Jane Christmas lives in Hamilton, Ontario.