This is the story of a girl who thought freedom meant never buying round-trip tickets.

In Lost with Liv, Olivia takes you through a decade of sex, drugs, EDM, and wildly impractical plane routes across six continents, and then into something she never expected to find: herself.

Told in raw, funny, and unfiltered vignettes, this memoir traces how a good girl with perfect attendance and a deep fear of sitting still turns herself into “Liv,” the woman who sleeps on office bathroom floors after surprise ketamine, crashes weddings in a wetsuit, joins a Bolivian Fyre Fest on the salt flats, and parties in a pool where the DEA, Belizean police, digital nomads, and Amish families are all bobbing in the same chlorinated water.

Beneath the chaos, something more honest is always pulsing: a longing to feel chosen, to belong, to be loved without needing to perform. The adventures get wilder, the stamps in the passport blur together, and yet the question grows louder: what am I actually running toward?

Across five chapters, each anchored in a distinct era of her twenties, Liv invites you into the mess, the magic, and the meaning she only found in hindsight.

Chapter 1: Chaos in Catalunya – The Girl Who Would Not Come Home
Study abroad in Barcelona was supposed to be a semester of sangria and museums. Instead, it becomes Olivia’s origin story as a chaos connoisseur. On day one she accidentally texts a cocaine dealer thinking he is a club promoter and snorts her first line at 2 pm on a Wednesday. She nearly jumps out of a third-story window just to get a boy’s attention, bounces around Europe treating countries like notches on a belt, and comes face-to-face with the version of herself who will do almost anything to stay interesting, needed, and adored. This chapter sets the tone: hilarious, cringe, and uncomfortably honest about the roots of her restlessness.

Chapter 2: Lost with Liv – Remote Work, Wrong Men, and Running on Empty
Fast-forward a few years. The world is bigger, her paychecks are remote, and Olivia has fully rebranded herself as “Liv”: the girl who always has a bus to catch and a story to tell. In Australia, a casual after-party introduces her to ketamine she did not know she was taking, leading to a hungover workday spent napping on toilet paper rolls on the office bathroom floor. In Bali, she scooters down 45-degree hills in the rain between coworking spaces and sound baths, trying to prove she can be both spiritual and successful if she just keeps moving. She collects lovers like stamps: a kayak instructor whose mother calls his name at 7 am, a British Essex boy who lovebombs her with cocaine and trauma in his childhood bedroom, and a string of men who feel more like distractions than partners. The chapter explores what happens when you build an identity around being the fun one, the flexible one, the girl who never says no, and how thin that persona starts to feel when you wake up alone in yet another hostel bunk.

Chapter 3: Lost with Liv 2.0 – Post-Covid Nomad and the Fine Line Between Adventure and Avoidance
When the world begins to reopen, Liv is twenty-seven and determined to make up for lost time. Belize is her first big post-Covid trip, and it reads like satire: she joins a fledgling nomad community run by ex-festival British party kids who treat guests like clients by day and chosen disciples by night. A small plane smuggling cocaine is shot down off the coast, the town quietly pillages the cargo, and it all somehow funnels back into the same boutique hotel that ends up hosting a DEA training for Belizean police. Liv watches American agents, local cops, Amish families, and digital nomads high on the confiscated product share a swimming pool, and realizes how disturbingly at home she feels in the middle of it.

In Brazil, a masked man invites her on a date, announces he has “a surprise,” and reveals a baby in the backseat on the way to do cocaine together by a pool. In Floripa, she lives in what might as well be a frat house, eats one hundred pieces of sushi on a rainy day, and gets in a car with three Brazilian men she barely knows to drive to an unknown beach. These stories are funny and outrageous, but they also mark the moment where Liv starts to see the pattern: adventure is no longer just about curiosity. It is also about what she does not want to sit still and feel.

Chapter 4: Lost with Liv 3.0 – Queer, Spiritual, and Still a Little Unhinged
Turning thirty cracks something open. On New Year’s Eve in Mexico, the night before her thirtieth birthday, a friend asks what she wants from the year. Liv does not say it out loud, but all she wants is love. Instead, she looks up at the stars and thinks, “Next time, I want to be the DJ.” Within months, she is spinning her first set at Afrikaburn, the African sibling of Burning Man, in a desert where her playa name becomes Dreamcatcher and a long-held threesome fantasy checks itself off the list near a giant dreamcatcher art installation.

Her hunger for more than nightlife leads her into reiki training on Mexican beaches, purple hair stained with incense smoke, and full moon circles where she starts holding space instead of just filling it. Volunteering at a hostel in Tel Aviv, she realizes the person she wants to kiss in the smoky dorm room is not the charming backpacker guy, but the woman ten years younger, passed out on the bunk across from her. That moment, and many like it, begin to stitch together a new understanding of her queerness.

Across Cape Town and Namibia, she steps into a different kind of risk. An astrologer casually mentions South Africa, and days later she is on a cheap flight from Sayulita with a layover in Newark, landing in a city that becomes a second home. An Airbnb experience drops her into Bridges for Music, a nonprofit in a township that turns into family, a place where Uber drivers are afraid to go and she will later return to teach and play. She is robbed in broad daylight on Valentine’s Day, kicked out of one hostel after defending a newly-arrived girl at 1 am, and finally lands in a dorm room known as “The Big 5,” where one roommate sleeps with her vibrator under her pillow and intimacy means everyone knows which toy is whose.

In Namibia, a French boy she met diving in Mozambique pulls her into his family’s orbit for a two-week desert wedding that should have been a fairytale and instead becomes a masterclass in boundaries. From being told to sleep in a tent with his friend because he is “sleeping with his mom,” to watching a naked local woman crash the wedding, punch her own mother, and get sent to the ICU, Liv discovers the exact point where romance rots into resentment. She blocks him on every app before the trip even ends, but keeps the friendships and spiritual collaborations that blossom from that circle, including with an American woman who mirrors her so closely it feels like fate.

This chapter is about unlearning: unlearning compulsory straightness, unlearning that worth equals wildness, and unlearning that being “down for anything” is the same as being brave.

Chapter 5: The Round-Trip Years – Coming Home without Giving Up the Road
Even as Liv deepens her spiritual practice and begins to come out, life asks her to stop running in a different way. Her grandmother dies, then her beloved Tony in the winter of 2024, and her grandfather in September 2025. She had planned to leave again that November and is suddenly, quietly, grateful that life anchored her at home long enough to say goodbye. In New York, she channels her need for movement into music and ceremony: hosting full moon circles, building a DJ collective, playing at Elsewhere, putting up signs in crystal shops, giving reiki in between flights instead of hiding hangovers.

The book closes on a different kind of adventure. In September 2025, she and her partner Emily take what will become their last pre–big-trip vacation: Ibiza. Liv plays her first-ever Ibiza set the exact same night and island where her South African mentor performs the biggest show of his career. The universe feels like it is winking: the girl who once stared at DJs under festival lights dreaming she could be up there is now sharing a bill, in her own small way, with someone she once idolized from the crowd.

The synchronicities keep stacking. That night a bouncer slaps Emily’s ass and waves her through a door because she is holding ecstasy pills, a moment that would have shattered Liv in her twenties but now only sharpens her sense of who and what she will protect. The next day, they snorkel and watch an octopus change colors in front of them, a private little miracle pulsing in the water. Months later she will chase the northern lights in Iceland on a four-day round trip, proof that short, intentional journeys can be just as transformative as the ones that last years.

Lost with Liv ends not with her boarding another one-way flight to escape herself, but with something quieter and more radical: curiosity that does not need chaos to justify it, adventure that does not require self-abandonment, and a woman who has finally learned that you can be a nomad and still have a home inside your own body. The next chapter of travel with Emily is already unfolding, somewhere in Southeast Asia, but that is another book.

This one is about the decade it took to be willing to sit still long enough to write it.