It’s the birthday of Paul Theroux (b. 1941), author of many novels and travel books and perhaps best known for his travel novel The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) about a four-month train odyssey through Asia.

Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, one of seven children in a Catholic family; he was a Boy Scout, poor athlete, and voracious reader. He started his college career at the University of Maine, where he was pre-med and actively protested the Vietnam War. It was only after transferring to the University of Massachusetts, where he took creative writing from Joseph Langland, that he admitted he wanted to be a writer; he’d initially thought writing wasn’t a masculine enough career. (Discuss.)

Post-college, Theroux taught briefly in Italy and then Malawi, Africa, where he was thrown out of the Peace Corps for participating in a coup against Malawi’s president-dictator, so there’s that, but Uganda let him in to teach English there. (Honestly, I would love that on my resume: “Thrown out of X for trying to overthrow evil government.” Shows initiative.) While in Uganda, he met Ann Castle and V.S. Naipaul; he married the former and was mentored by the latter. (Ooh ooh, I want that on my resume too: “Mentored by Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul.”)

Theroux began writing novels such as Girls at Play (1969), Jungle Lovers (1971), and Saint Jack (1973); he often wrote about Westerners in post-colonial Africa and Asia. Things in Africa had heated up, so the family left for Singapore in the late 60s and ultimately landed in London, where his wife had gotten a job and where Theroux ditched teaching to write full time. The Black House (1974) is a dark ghost story about a failing marriage, set in the English countryside; Picture Palace (1978) won the Whitbread Award; The Mosquito Coast (1982) was made into a film in 1986. He’s written many more novels, all of which sound intriguing in their own ways and the latest of which is Mother Land (2017), a satire about a horrible matriarch that prompted Stephen King to write, “Theroux possesses a fabulously nasty sense of humor.”

Theroux split from his first wife in 1993 and two years later married Sheila Donnelly. They live in Cape Cod and Hawaii, where Theroux keeps chickens and uses their eggs for omelets. Theroux has a rich history of eating eggs: he once lived on megapode eggs while on an island in the South Pacific, cooking them in hot springs on the side of a volcano. (If you don’t know what megapodes are, find out here.)

My gosh, I have a dull resume.

Have a cooler, it’s-snowing-in-April kind of Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.