If Eva Hoffman's memoir about dislocation in language and space is one that rails against such disjunctures (if unevenly, and with the knowledge that dislocation can also be beneficial), Jenny Diski's travel memoirs go so far as to celebrate the dislocating nature of travel, as well as the urge to position oneself as an outsider, peering in (or, turning away). Diski's travels to Antarctica and America, her encounters with strangers, and her determined proposition to remain a stranger herself, combine to offer up a narrator no less self-aware than Hoffman, and Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train are texts that both engage in and resist their truth-telling tag. Indeed, though she offers up a portrait of herself as knowing, Diski is also a withholding author, who plays with the idea of discovery and revelation only to deny the ultimate effectiveness of both.

Like Hoffman, Diski is engaged with questions of mediated reality, and indeed at times in both travel memoirs, she offers up a Baudrillardian reading of her experience. In his travelogue America, Baudrillard suggests that: