Look for Me There - Luke Russert

Luke Russert's Look for Me There is, I think, a pretty frank and honest travel book and memoir, and I want to give Russert full credit for that. But in a nutshell, for me it's: not a bad book by an author I am left with mixed feelings about.

Luke Russert is the son of the beloved and universally respected news journalist Tim Russert. Tim Russert, while at work for NBC, died suddenly from a heart attack on June 13, 2008 while Luke (then 22 years old) was traveling in Italy with his mother. By October 2016, Luke himself had been eight years on the NBC career path he began after his father's death. But he was unhappy, unsatisfied, unfulfilled (you can choose the word or right combination of words), and decided to walk away from his job in order to explore the world for himself. 

"What pains me isn't just a latent wanderlust. The last eight years have been such a whirlwind that I've never fully processed my grief for Dad. It's apparent that I've spent so much time honoring his legacy that I've never truly accepted his death. Worse, by honoring that legacy, I have failed to forge my own life. I'm thirty years old and have no idea who I am..."

 So Luke, largely on his mother's dime, begins to travel from country to country as he slowly morphs into an Instagram addict who is only satisfied after he "drops a bomb" on his favorite social media platform. He stops traveling for pleasure and what he can learn about himself and the countries he explores, and begins to imagine that his Instagram followers actually need the content he posts:

"Whereas in the past I may have taken a moment to prep for the day so I could get more out of it, now I'm more focused on just getting it done and taking the needed pictures. Pictures are my muse. They provide content and, on Instagram, give people an idea of what I do. They somehow make me feel that I matter."

 I'm still not sure if Russert is telling me that he understands the shallowness of this admission, or if he's justifying the kind of traveler he soon enough became. Part of the reason that I wonder this is how terribly he resented his mother's attempts to tell him it was time to come home and get on with the rest of his life, to find some purpose in life other than keeping his Instagram followers happy enough to attach little hearts and comments to every picture he posted. 

But here's where it gets tricky. Luke grew up an over-protected son. According to Luke, his father never wanted to take a risk; he never traveled outside the country; he always had a plan for anything that could happen to himself or his family. And Tim expected Luke to live the same way. So did Luke begin his world travels as a way to run from that part of his father's legacy? Does traveling around the world solo make Luke feels as if he's beaten his father at something?

Long after everyone around him sees it, Luke finally does come around to the idea that he is wasting his life:

"What causes me the anxiety that leads to self-medicating? What am I searching for? Why did I feel so empty after living such a full, blessed, and privileged life?...Being part of a legacy also meant I was living in loss. I come to realize that I'm also beset with not only inadequacy but also its sibling - fear of failure - along with a real fear of mortality."

 Wrong as I likely am to be, this is where I end up with what Luke Russert has to say in Look for Me There:

Luke was a young man trying to live up to the expectations of a father he completely admired but to whom he felt that he could never measure up. His answer was to give up and wander the world and life for three years, finally deciding to be more like his mother: "spontaneous, creative, and experimental." 

Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. I hope he has his life together now.