By Alana DiPlacido
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Peter Zheutlin, a local author and journalist, did not know he had a famous relative until he received a letter from a stranger in 1993. That letter would unlock a long-forgotten chapter of family history and begin Zheutlin’s career as an author. The letter introduced Zheutlin to the story of Annie Londonderry: his great-great aunt who may have been the first woman to traverse the globe by bicycle. Years after receiving that letter and conducting extensive research into his relative’s journey across the world, Zheutlin would publish two different books recounting Annie’s story. The first, a non-fiction book titled “Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride” was published in 2007, and the second and his most recent publication, “Spin,” is a historical fiction account of the same story published in 2021. Both books, though varying in their degrees of factuality, recount the same fascinating story of Annie Londonderry and her journey across the world by bicycle.
Zheutlin led the audience gathered in Walpole Public Library’s (WPL) community room through a fascinating presentation on his research into Annie and her journey. Zheutlin did not shy away from his great-great aunt’s pretension for lying, rather he embraced it by regaling the audience with many of the fabulous stories Annie had invented along her journey in order to promote herself and make her way through the world. Annie began this trip and promoted it under the guise that she was doing so in order to win a wager between two wealthy men; however, Zheutlin admitted that there is no evidence that this wager ever truly existed. From the beginning of her journey, Annie was unafraid of bending the facts: she went by the last name Londonderry despite her family name being Cohen, she invented and ignored stipulations in the wager as they best suited her, and she took on the identity of various different people throughout her trip: one moment calling herself an orphan and the next saying that she was a the daughter of a wealthy businessman.
Peter Zheutlin, on the other hand, has a much greater concern with telling the truth than his great-great aunt did. He joked that the switch between writing a historical non-fiction and the later fiction version of the story was jarring: “I kept having to remind myself that I was allowed to make things up! It was very freeing in that way.” In describing the difference between his first and second accounts of Annie Londonderry’s journey, Zheutlin says that “Around the World on Two Wheels” is “100% true” while “Spin” is “100% true, except for the parts that aren’t!” Zheutlin’s evident sense of humor and Annie Londonderry’s fabulous propensity for making things up made for a hilarious author talk at the Walpole Public Library. Every attendee spent the evening both fascinated by the true story of Annie Londonderry’s bicycle expedition across the globe and thoroughly entertained by the not-so-true parts.
