The Traces

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What to expect

The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life.

Mairead Small Staid’s debut, The Traces, is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson.

Critics Review

  • “Staid plumbs her travels in Italy as a college student to examine ‘happiness, both intensive and sustained’ in her beautiful debut…[and] weaves in the writings of myriad other thinkers…Staid’s evocative prose and insightful analysis are tough to forget.”

    Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  • “A stunning exploration of happiness and memory. These brilliant, beautiful essays challenged and delighted me. A transcendent debut.”

    Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  • “Immortalizing one golden season in Florence, she captures the flux of her own personhood and potential―and ours, too―under the influence of time, art, weather, love, and chance.”

    Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author

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