Home > Work > The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia
1 " The expatriate mentality is a tough thing to explain easily. Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi delivery and 50-channel cable television to relocate permanently to some third-world hole usually has to be motivated by a highly destructive personality defect. Either that, or something about home creates psychological demons that in turn create the urge for radical escape.I’d moved overseas straight out of college and been a classic expatriate ever since. I had all the symptoms: periodic unsuccessful attempts to repatriate, a tendency to try to make grandiose foreign adventures compensate for a total inability to accumulate money; bad teeth; unhealthy personal relationships, etc. I’d been aware for years that my passion for uprooting and completely changing my lifestyle and even my career was like a drug addiction – not only did I get off on it, but I needed to do it fairly regularly just to keep from getting the shakes. "
― , The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia