Cirrus@Austlit

'“The way of the train is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital,” Jenny Diski wrote in her 2002 travel memoir Stranger on a Train, in which she interweaves the story of a trip around the United States by Amtrak with her memories of incarceration in mental hospitals in her youth. She is taking the journey to write a book but her stated intention is “to keep still”. Her hope is for “a substantial journey without going anywhere exactly, meetings and conversations which also would go nowhere”. But lying in her sleeping compartment, she finds that “all the separate stories, all those minds and hearts took on volume and mass, occupying the empty space in my compartment, squeezing out the very air before spreading to the corridor outside and the entire train”.' (Introduction)