Synopses & Reviews
In the tradition of Jill Ker Conway's bestselling autobiography, The Road from Coorain, Geraldine Brooks's
Foreign Correspondence is a memoir of an idyllic girlhood in the middle-class western suburbs of Sydney, Australia in the 1960s and 70s. The international pen friendships she forged with correspondents in France, the Middle East, New Jersey, and even one right across town, enriched her life and, ultimately, led to a career abroad as a foreign correspondent. As Brooks comes of age, so does Australia, and interwoven with her personal narrative is the story of her country's emergence from a parochial migrant colony to a diverse and fu11y mature independent nation.
Brooks goes from the protected environment of a Catholic girls school to the University of Sydney, and at the age of twenty, leaves the family home to finish university in her very own flat near the bustling Sydney harbor. She hires on as an intern at the Sydney Morning Herald and then makes the momentous and thrilling decision to leave Australia and attend the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, which leads to an illustrious career as a globe-trotting reporter.
But she never forgets "that other foreign correspondent the passionate young girl in faraway Sydney who dreamed of adventures in dangerous places." Brooks realizes that her pen pals were more than just a childhood phase. Rather, they have shaped her very being, and so she decides to track them down in adulthood. In so doing, she embarks on a bittersweet journey of self-discovery that takes her around the world on the most meaningful assignment of her life. Candid, thoughtful, and immediately captivating, Foreign Correspondence is a story about the ties of family, friends, and place, the conflicts of tradition and change, and the longing for a life elsewhere.
Review
"An evocative, superbly written tale of a woman's journey to self-understanding....Alternately stirring and humorous, it offers an incisive emotional and spiritual travelogue, as well as the chronicle of an era." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[C]harming and sharply intelligent, with much to say about growing up female and geographically unconnected....Foreign Correspondence is full of a generous interest in the life beyond the self. Geraldine Brooks is one of those writers who have truly gone out into the world, and she has sent back her dispatches with grace and good humor." Valerie Sayers, New York Times Book Review
Review
"This lyrical, compelling book, which takes us around the world and through time, turns out to be very much a story about family and self, and about Brooks's journey toward a home of her own." Washington Post Book World
Review
"One of the better memoirs to come along, in an overcrowded field, in some time." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"A thought-provoking memoir, opens a window on an Australian childhood
filled with charming anecdote and careful introspection." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"Shifting effortlessly through time and place, this scintillating book details Brooks's evolution from restless teen to award-winning journalist, starting with the seductive tales of her pen pals." GQ
Review
"Intimate, thoughtful, and also very funny
In a literary landscape that has become glutted with memoirs, Foreign Correspondence is a keeper. With a deft touch, Brooks weaves the personal into the political, the domestic into the foreign, and the past into the present." Seattle Times
Synopsis
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 America. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Intimate, moving, and often humorous, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.
Synopsis
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 America. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Intimate, moving, and often humorous, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.
About the Author
Geraldine Brooks is also the author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, where she reported on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa. A native of Australia and a graduate of Sydney University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she currently lives in Virginia with her husband and young son.
Reading Group Guide
1. Discuss Brooks' choice to structure the book in two parts, and not to tell the story in straight chronology. What are the benefits of these choices? Are there any drawbacks?
2. In what ways did the geography of place affect Brooks?
3. Brooks was an outsider, a loner, an observer--as shown by events ranging from her childhood rheumatic fever, which often separated her from schoolmates, to living "down under," to coming of age on the cusp of the feminist movement. Is this feeling of "otherness" essential to a writer? To this writer?
4. Brooks writes, "In every urban family's history, there is a generation that loses its contact with the land." Do you think there is more dissonance between the generations that are on either side of this loss than there is to generations further away from it? Can you pinpoint the time in your family history where your family lost contact with the land? How has it affected your family?
5. Australians have an instinctual need to leave their island and explore the world. Discuss this as a theme in Brooks' memoir.
6. Australian men have a deep and particular relationship with their male friends, their mates, as described by Brooks and others. Compare and contrast this with the idea of women's friendships in the United States, which are often cited as different and deeper than men's friendships.
7. Discuss Brooks' religious upbringing and why you think she converted to Judaism. Did her childhood experiences foreshadow the conversion to come?
8. Brooks comes to a gradual realization that Australia is not so small a place after all. How does this compare or contrast with American myths of exploration and home?
9. In what ways does the Australian "Cultural Cringe" syndrome mirror the more personal cringe that many children, especially teens, feel about their parents and their brothers or sisters?
10. Brooks writes that she "had more years of shared confidences with Joannie than with any of my mates in Sydney." Would their relationship have been less important if they had not developed it through writing only? In what ways? In your experience, does the act of writing letters make a friendship stronger?
11. Do you think e-mail has changed the pen pal experience for kids? In what ways?
12. Assume you have to choose one or the other, which is preferable--to grow up in a restricted environment with no car, with no travel, and with curfews and strict limits? Or to travel widely and experience many different cultures and have more responsibility and opportunity at an earlier age? Talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each.
13. Discuss Brooks' identification with Joannie--her observation that she's living the life Joannie was meant to lead.
14. Does Brooks follow or disregard (personally and professionally) the advice she received from a veteran correspondent, "Never get in the middle. You have to choose your side." How does the author feel about the middle?
15. When Brooks is in the French village of St. Martin, visiting Janine, do you suspect that she will ultimately identify so strongly with her?
16. Brooks confesses that she felt an "inevitability" about leaving Australia. Do you also think it's inevitable that she'll go back and live in Australia with her husband and son?
17. Brooks' father kept secrets from her for a long time. How might she have felt if she learned about her father's other daughter at an earlier age? Do you think he made the right choice in keeping it from her for so long?
18. Talk about the "happiness set point." In what ways do you essentially agree with or question this theory of human behavior?