Book review: On The Couch

Fleur Britten’s “On The Couch” is the first travel memoir about couchsurfing I’ve seen; this doesn’t mean there aren’t any others, naturally, but it does mean that I picked it off the library shelf with a surge of excitement.  “Ooh!” I thought to myself.  “This is gonna be good!”

I was, unfortunately, wrong.

Couchsurfing is a practice that has existed under many names (“staying with friends”, “staying with friends of friends”, “mooching”) before it became slightly more organized with the advent of the Couchsurfing website, an easy-search database of those who have couches and those who need them, all around the world.  Ms. Britten’s goal, as she describes it at the beginning of the book (and apparently, on her Couchsurfing profile), was to make her way overland from Moscow to Shanghai, zigzagging through various other cool places (Mongolia! Kazakhstan!) and staying on couches the entire time.

I noticed that Ms. Britten’s other writing credits include The Hedonist’s Guide to London, as well as Milan and, somewhat broadly, Life; a LESS hedonistic person, I cannot possibly imagine.  She spends most of her trip and most of the memoir complaining bitterly that nothing is as she wants it: the couches are too small or too hard, the hosts aren’t catering to her every whim, the hosts are too tour-guide-y, the hosts aren’t tour guide-y ENOUGH, seeing as how she has no other sightseeing plans on her agenda but following them around.

She seems incapable of functioning on her own, after fellow travel-mate Ollie has to go home for medical reasons; she spends large chunks of every chapter faffing on about how she’s afraid to be alone, she’s afraid to talk to her hosts, she’s tired of the enforced niceness that comes from being a couchsurfer.  And talking about an unhealthy relationship with someone she obliquely calls “The Emperor”, a subject both inappropriate to the book and deeply uninteresting to the reader.

Couchsurfing as a global movement is full of a very large variety of travellers, this I know: some people love it, not everyone enjoys it, and some people (like Ms Britten) seem to feel they SHOULD enjoy it, but would actually prefer five star hotels (the one jubilantly happy part of the book is when she can take a breather from surfing in an all-expenses-paid luxury queen bed).  I don’t have a problem with all the various reasons to try couchsurfing, but complaining about the very things that you’d assume you’d have to face going into it…that seems a bit pointless.  If you’re planning on travelling around the world staying on people’s couches, and relying on the generosity of strangers, you have to expect that some things come along with the bargain: language barriers, awkward social issues regarding being in someone else’s home, clashes with fellow surfers, uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.  It’s part of the deal.  And also, Ms Britten? I could stop hearing about the “strangely attractive” handsomeness of every single couchsurfing man you stay with.

Overall, this book was a dead disappointment.  I hoped for something balanced — criticism leavened with slightly less personal whining would have been ideal, since I’m already a Couchsurfing convert myself, and would have loved to hear legitimate Devil’s advocacy.  As it was, I mostly felt distasteful, not for couchsurfing, but for Ms Britten, who clearly should have stayed in her comfort zone in London and stopped trying to hand out crappy boxes of chocolates in fits of contrived generosity.