The Leisure Seeker

American author Michael Zadoorian’s comic novel The Leisure Seeker (2009) follows the elderly couple Ella and John Robina as they escape from the attentions of adult children and doctors (Ella has terminal cancer) for one last road trip in the family RV. In 2017, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren.

The novel opens on the road, as John and Ella slip away from the family home in Detroit. Ella—who narrates the novel—reflects on the life they have lived here in the middle-class suburb of Madison Heights. She and her husband, she decides, belong to the group of people “who stay.” For decades they stayed in their home, stayed in the jobs (to pay off the home), and stayed in their marriage for better or worse. Now they are leaving.

Ella has terminal cancer, and she has decided to decline further treatment in the face of protests from her children, Cindy and Kevin. John has advanced Alzheimer’s. As he drives, he continually asks Ella if they are home yet. Every time she explains that they are not going home, “We’re on vacation.” Ella can’t drive because of her pain. She walks with a cane, and her treatment has left her wearing a wig (although early in the journey she decides to let it fly from the window).



They head to Chicago and then hit the old Route 66, bound for Disneyland in California. Each night they park up at an RV site, where John spreads a sheet against the side of their vehicle so they can project slides of their previous family holidays. They reminisce about dead friends and their grown children’s younger years, looking askance at modern vacationers, jetting all over the place. Ella mixes a cocktail, which helps—together with her “little blue pills”—to manage the “discomfort” of her metastasizing cancer.

During the day, they visit tourist sites, some familiar from past trips (although now run-down and sad), others new. Following the recommendations of a guidebook, they buy grapes from a roadside stand in Missouri, eat “Ugly Crust” pie at the Mid-Point Cafe in Adrian, Texas, stop at the Reptile Ranch in the Jericho Gap and the Barbed Wire Museum in McLean, and see the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo. They stop for lunch at diners, where John is permitted to order as many hamburgers as he wants.

The elderly couple keeps each other company as best they can. After more than 60 years of marriage, their companionship is a matter of small gestures and long-buried resentments. It doesn’t help that John’s memory is failing. At one point, in the middle of an argument, John loses the thread. He pats Ella’s knee and smiles at her. She starts the argument again from the beginning, because she doesn’t want to give up.



They also make friends along the way: a goth teenager, kindly waitresses, a very helpful man covered in obscene tattoos. During their nightly slideshow at the Lincoln Motel in Chandler, Oklahoma, they spot a group of teenagers watching from the darkness and invite them to sit closer. Ella opens some beers and the two generations exchange comments about the 1960s outfits captured on the slides (from a trip to the 1967 World’s Fair).

Ella and John also get into some scrapes. Ella pulls a gun on some highway robbers who take her for an easy target. When they are pulled over by the police, they consider making a run for it, but John manages to appear compos mentis.

From time to time, they phone Cindy and Kevin to fill them in on their trip. The children plead with them to come back, threatening them when this doesn’t work, but Ella is resolute. The plus-size Ella thinks to herself that she is going to sneak back for seconds of life, just a little more while no one is looking.



John is lucid in the mornings, and it is then that they are most able to connect. They have sex, reminisce about their lives, and discuss the trip. As the day wears on, he sinks into a fog, and occasionally, it causes serious problems. When a drive-in clerk plays a mild prank, he flies into a rage, and from time to time, he threatens to wander off without Ella. Even more troublingly, Ella begins to suspect that he is contemplating suicide.

They ride the Ferris wheel on Santa Monica pier and then set off for Disneyland. There Ella contemplates what Heaven might be like, before rejecting the idea of God and Heaven altogether. By now, Ella’s real destination is clear. The van’s exhaust is leaking, so Ella runs it while John is asleep, allowing them both to die peacefully.