Hello
My name is Torre DeRoche
I’m the author of two books and this here blog. I live in Melbourne, Australia, but hold two passports, because I was born to American parents. I’ve always felt conflicted about whether I’m a bohemian Californian flower child or someone who gets intimate with dangerous wildlife and uses too many swear words.
I settled somewhere in the middle.
I didn’t set out to become a writer. My father was a film and television writer, and I saw how the craft robbed him of hair and put a crease in his brow so deep we could almost water the family cat from it.
I pursued visual communications instead, but when I moved my life onto a boat in my mid-twenties and set sail with a new love, only words would suffice to express the true terror of being stranded mid-Pacific on a boat with no steering, no working engine and two holes draining the ocean into our home.
That’s how Love with a Chance of Drowning came to be written and then published in 2013.
My hair then fell out and my brow creased.
And, oh, the love drowned.
And so here we are.
My second book is due to be published in September and it’s called The Worrier’s Guide to the End of the World. Set in Tuscany and then India, the story begins at a time in my life when all hope seemed lost, when I met a wise, hilarious and coo-coo woman who was walking her way around the world. If you enjoy a touch of comedy with themes of death, anxiety and existential panic, I think you’re going to enjoy it.
I’ve been published in the travel writing anthology An Innocent Abroad, alongside Cheryl Strayed, Dave Eggars, Sloan Crosley, Pico Iyer, et al. My work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian Travel, Sydney Morning Herald, and Emirates’ Open Skies magazine, as well as a range of digital publications. You can also find a story of mine in the 2016 Lonely Planet anthology True Stories from the World’s Best Writers.
I’m hoping that my next big adventure will be a walking pilgrimage with my sixty-six-year old mother, who once cupped a large pair of goat’s testicles at a children’s petting zoo and yelled out “I WANT TO KNOW HOW MUCH THEY WEIGH.” (Answer: heavy.) I told her I might write about her one day and she clapped her hands together with glee and became 300% more offensive.
The lady delivers.
