Hello! I’m Tito Aznar for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2025 Spring Read.
Returning as adults to the places of our childhood is not without nostalgia. The locations often seem smaller than they are in our memories, the distances shorter–or longer–but never the same. There is always a disparity between what lives in our memories and what really is.
Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America is more than a travel book. It’s an exploration of nostalgia and memory. With wit and humor, Bryson not only describes the places he visits, but he also paints a picture of a personal and collective past by addressing the way he sees the towns he visits and the way he thinks about what they have become.
The idea of nostalgia is present in Bryson’s work from the very beginning, as he recounts his childhood in Iowa and the many road trips his family would take across the U.S. Those trips–full of picnic lunches, dusty motels, and endless hours in a hot car–were formative experiences for him, as they created a mental map of an idealized America: simple pleasures, quirky diners, and small towns with friendly people. These memories belong to a golden era for Bryson, and they motivate him to go on a road trip as an adult to rediscover that America.
However, the America Bryson remembers no longer exists, or maybe it never did, at least not in the way he remembers it. That’s one thing that can be tricky about nostalgia; it doesn’t just preserve memories. It embellishes them, polishes them and helps them shine. In our minds and hearts we are left with something better, or different, than what actually happened or what actually was. Through the book, Bryson struggles with this.
As he returns to the places he visited as a child, he is constantly struck by how things have changed. The charm he remembers is no longer there; now there is an abundance of strip malls, fast food places, urbanization, and tourist traps. This “new” America is dull and has no soul. For example, when he visits Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, he expects to find a place filled with literary history. However, all he finds is a tourist trap filled with gift shops and cheap souvenirs–not what he expected. He leaves feeling disappointed and somewhat bitter.
This becomes a pattern throughout the book. Bryson’s memories set him up with high expectations, and reality often falls short. However, in these moments of disappointment, he reveals something important about how memory works: our memories aren’t just about the past; they shape how we see our present.
Even though Bryson romanticizes the past, he doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at himself for it. He is well aware of his nostalgia. At one point, he mentions that he used to think Des Moines was the center of the universe, the quintessential perfect small town. As an adult, however, he sees it for what it is: a nice but entirely unremarkable Midwestern city. Yet, as he acknowledges the gap between memories and reality, he doesn’t let go of the longing for the world he remembers–or thinks he remembers.
Bryson’s journey isn’t just about disappointment, though. He does have moments of joy, moments when he can connect with his memories, moments when the past and the present seem to align.
While he might not find the idyllic small-town America of his childhood, Bryson does find traces of it in people and places where he may not have expected, such as a quiet back road, a beautiful view, or a friendly waitress. These moments remind us that nostalgia can help us appreciate the good things that still exist even if they are not exactly the way we remember them.
I’m Tito Aznar for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
