Most of the excitement of travel writing, which Potts tellingly exhibits in his own work, springs from a newfound ability to seduce beautiful, charming women (or men, as the case may be). Your girlfriend from home is a distant, inelegant memory because now a girl that resembles a more buxom Diane Kruger and speaks four languages in a beguiling lilt can’t stop calling you. You want to gloat, so you turn to the page – if you can turn away from the girl. (Check out how even Potts’ recent, more “mature” material almost always features an attractive nymph as anchor or narrative impetus.) We can always add the gift of Bacchus –notoriously overindulged by Americans – and the relative freedom of being simultaneously novelty and untouchable to your new public, and we have lift-off.

However, being an expat doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to succumb to the temptation of writing about it. For example, were you to evoke the setting of your previous home, the cultural and literal distance of expatriation could give you a perspective and license that you wouldn’t necessarily have if you were still ensconced there. And the moral derelicts and glib poseurs we’re all painfully familiar were that way before they left home. But we’re not all running away from something. Some of us actually know what the hell they’re doing, eh, Potts? For starters, I know a guy down the street from here whose name begins with a Eu- and ends with a Genides…

But there is something to all this, to the characterization of expat as racing to reinvent his or herself, and thus dwelling in shallow creative soil. Reinvention of this sort is applicable to either your life or your work, not both simultaneously, Potts attests. Luckily, I have no life, so I shrug off these admonitions and dwell in the abyss of my black itinerant soul. Tomorrow: a post about the time I drank three liters of LIDL wine and seduced an Austrian ballet dancer named Traudl. After sniffing heroin and duelling a Turkish gang member. On May Day.

p.s. Far be it for me to criticize Rolf Potts, who is, as advertised, basically the Jack Kerouac of expats – if he looked and behaved a little more like Matt Damon. His website is choc-a-bloc with satisfactory output.