The Good Girl's Guide To Getting Lost Analysis

The 22-year-old Rachel Friedman was incredibly driven and subscribed to the notion of the five-year plan and thus lived a sheltered life. The title, The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost, is a direct example of the purpose of her two-year adventure where she successfully breaks free from the norm and gets real-life enjoyment of living life outside the box. She was a rule follower, a “good girl” who always choose the normal path but this evidently did not make her happy nor made her feel she was fulfilling her purpose. Through her travels she loses her old self and becomes an authentic traveler. Through these two years, she discovered people, places and experiences are far more important than possession and that the present moment should be

This is not her first trip oversees, as a ten-year-old, she travelled to Europe with her family as tourists and dashed all over Europe stopping by different cities just long enough to take photos. Going to Ireland was never a plan, it was her intuition and subconscious that pushed her to take an opportunity to reinvent herself. In Ireland, she settles into a bohemian lifestyle of waitressing, bartending, drinking and dancing in Galway. She becomes roommates with Carly who evidently becomes her “wise life guide” and who is addicted to the rush of being a foreigner. After four months in Ireland, she goes back home, still confused, to finish her final year of college. Post-graduation she has no idea what to do with herself and rather than following the graduate school route her father wants her to follow, she decides to pack her bags and head to Australia on working visa to visit Carly. In Australia, her experience is quite different. Rather than packing a huge suitcase and spending her time just going out to bars and working like she did in Ireland, she just packs much ligher and balances her time with going on adventures and working. In Australia, she comes to realization of the differentiation between American and Australian culture. She finds the American outlook on work, travel and life much more limiting than Australian who are much more practical and who for the most part, tend to focus