New memoir details adventures in former USSR

At the age of 28, Audrey Murray boarded a one-way flight to Kazakhstan to begin the first leg of a solo tour through the former USSR. Through the course of 12 months, the Canton native visited 11 former republics as part of a fascinating and surprising journey that would involve “kidnappers, garbage bags of money, and encounters with the weird and wonderful from Mongolia to Tajikistan.”

Audrey Murray

For Murray, it was a trip of discoveries — not only about the region but about herself — and it forms the basis of her new book, Open Mic Night in Moscow, a blend of memoir and “offbeat travel guide” that was published last month by HarperCollins.

In Open Mic Night, Murray writes of performing standup comedy in Moscow and details a wide range of adventures she experienced, including attending a wedding in Uzbekistan with a stranger she met on a plane. Described as “sometimes surprising, often disconcerting, and always entertaining,” Open Mic Night, according to the publisher, will “inspire you to take the leap and embark on your own journey into the unknown.”

Murray, 31, described herself as a voracious reader as a child, spending lots of time at the Canton Public Library, and then stapling sheets of paper to pieces of cardboard at home so that she could write her own stories. “It was just something I always did as a kid,” she said.

Murray attended the Canton Public Schools through grade 9, then transferred to Noble and Greenough School in Dedham to finish high school. During the summer after graduation, she wrote two stories for the Canton Citizen. One was about Canton teenagers looking for summer jobs; the other dealt with going away to college. When she received a check for her writing, she thought to herself, “Maybe this is something you can do professionally.”

Murray studied at Johns Hopkins University where she earned a degree in creative writing, and then headed to Washington, D.C., and began working for a consulting firm while trying to write in the evenings after work. It was during that time that a friend dared her to move to China. She took him up on the challenge, reasoning that teaching English during the day would allow her more time to write.

“I moved to China in the summer of 2010,” she said. “I was an SAT tutor for about six years. My students were all Chinese students who wanted to go to college in the United States. It was something I really enjoyed.”

In Shanghai, Murray became involved with standup comedy. She had done some improv comedy in college, but when a friend in Shanghai told her that he wanted to start a comedy club and have her do standup, her initial reaction was to decline. Then he told her that if she didn’t take part, there would only be men involved and she changed her mind.

“I was beyond terrified,” she said of the first night she got on stage. But she loved the rush she felt after talking about her impressions of living in China. She found that she wanted to continue doing standup and she became a co-founder of Kung Fu Comedy in Shanghai.

While living and working in Shanghai, Murray thought more about an idea that she had been considering: traveling to the former Soviet Union by herself. Some of her neighbors in Canton had hosted children from Chernobyl who were recovering from the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and she had read enough about the former Soviet Union to have a general idea about what life had been like in the countries of the federation. Her fascination grew, however, when a Russian boyfriend that she dated in college talked about his homeland.

“Hearing the way he described it, his memories of it were very different,” Murray said. “That sparked an interest.”

She realized that the two countries had more in common than she had thought. Both were large monolingual countries with a diverse population that considered themselves to be the center of the world. “When you find something that doesn’t conform to your expectations, that can be an entry point,” Murray said.

Wanting to test the possibility of traveling alone, she headed to Kiev, Ukraine, and spent 24 hours alone in a country where she knew no one and did not speak the language. The short trip was successful, but she did not begin her 12-month adventure for quite a while. She wrote in China, including doing work for various publications, but decided to move back to the United States in order to make writing a priority.

“If I really wanted to do something with writing, it was probably best to be in the United States,” she said.

Murray moved to New York in the winter of 2013, but when a former boss from Shanghai contacted her offering her a job along with paying for her trip back to China, Murray saw it as an opportunity to be closer to the former Soviet Union and take the trip that she couldn’t stop thinking about.

Murray said it took a while to work up the nerve, but she decided to return to Shanghai and she bought a one-way ticket to Kazakhstan. Her lifestyle from the fall of 2015 to the fall of 2016 became one of traveling in the former Soviet Union for an extended period and then returning to Shanghai to work. In addition to Kazakhstan, she visited Russia, Estonia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, exploring what life was like and also performing comedy.

Murray kept a blog called Soviet Reunion while she was traveling, which she later used as the basis for Open Mic Night in Moscow. She took videos, made recordings, and posted thoughts and photos, but quickly fell behind. While she writing the book, she filled in the blog with memories, but soon realized something. “You don’t have to write every single thing that happened to you,” she said. “You should figure out what’s interesting and focus on that.”

She began working on her book and met with her agent and her editor, both of whom had been college friends of hers. When she finally got the phone call that her book was going to be published, she was overwhelmed. “It was just the craziest moment of my life,” she said. “I had an editor who really believed in me.”

Murray recently returned to the United States after visiting Kiev for the first time since her 24-hour trip years ago. “It was really emotional to know that I had been there with this crazy dream,” she said. “It was really powerful.”

Open Mic Night in Moscow is available wherever books are sold. Murray will speak about the book on Wednesday, October 10, at 7 p.m. at the Canton Public Library.

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Posted by Mary Ann Price on Aug 21 2018. Filed under Features. Both comments and pings are currently closed.