BY THE TIME I HAD HIT MY LATE twenties my first, eventful but short-lived marriage was over and I was a single mother to a toddler and a baby. It was shocking, but also exhilarating, since the future lay entirely in my hands. I was working as a freelance journalist and wrote in the pockets of time I found when the children were napping, or late at night after they’d gone to bed. Life as a single mother was precarious but also exciting and, as a travel journalist, I was also lucky to have regular trips away on my own, to contemplate my life and where I wanted it to take me.
PHOTOGRAPH: PHILIP LEE HARVEY
Just before I turned 30, I met a Russian acrobat working for a summer in England. He seduced me with urgent, romantic stories of his homeland in North Ossetia, deep in the Caucasus mountains, in wildest, most remote southern Russia. When his visa ended and he asked me to visit him in Russia, I knew I had to go.