Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over

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Description

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and The usa. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found women and men whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Intimate, moving, and regularly humorous, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of each girl who has ever yearned to change into a woman of the world.
The leap between dreamy child living in a provincial Australian neighborhood and journalist hopscotching through war zones is massive. In Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks (Nine Parts of Desire) unravels the rope that pulled and tugged her toward adventure and away from “a very small world” where her circle of relatives had no car and had never boarded a plane or placed an international phone call. “I’d never imagined myself as any person whose packing list would include a chador, much less a bulletproof vest,” she says. Preserved in the cellar of her parents’ home in Sydney were letters Brooks had received as an adolescent from several international pen pals, around whom she spun a romantic view of the world. Wondering about the reality of their lives and the progression of her own, she tracks them down in France, Japan, the Middle East, and New York. En route, Brooks delivers a wonderful meditation on childhood and adolescence lashed with wealthy details and quirky humor. Speaking of a current pen pal, she notes: “Raed, from the West Bank, stoned my car in 1987; now he writes to tell me how he is faring in college.”

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