Foreign Correspondence
 Geraldine Brooks
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 1998 Anchor Books Doubleday NY USA
  ISBN: 0385483732


What does the world look like from a backyard 2000 miles below the equator? In Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks grows up longing to find out. This is her memoir of how she did it with a little help from her global pen pals.

Well, that's the short of it. The long of it is a lively, humorous ever so familiar memoir of a girl's family life in a working-class suburb Down Under during the 1950s & 1960s. When Australians were still laboring under the second-child syndrome, never quite good enough. When home owners were still trying to plant English gardens, paint faded French scenes & everyone thought the rest of the world was better. Even their Prime Minister would rather have been British.

Compared to the view out of my window in grey, sooty London, Geraldine Brooks had very interesting parents & a loving family & a colorful place to live. One of my Geography assignments was to prepare a complete book on a chosen country. I chose Australia, writing off for brochures, pamphlets & statistics. Australia seemed to me a fabulous, fresh place inhabited by people with wide-open mouths, a carefree life & quiet, mystical Aborigines.

The grass always being greener, Geraldine would have felt my childhood to have been twice as exciting as hers even if I did live in dull old Britain. By dint of my school being round the corner from the Natural History Museum, I saw a lot of its insides every day, particularly in the long, wet winters.

Funny how she's ended up on the Eastern Seaboard of America after writing for a prestigious newspaper & I've ended up on the westernmost tip of the continent after managing a world-class medical news magazine.

Reading Geraldine Brooks' memories is to have lived another childhood, with another set of parents, family, home & schools. What was it like? While often myopically boring,it was also weirdly troubling especially when her father was in one of his moods. Both her mother & her father were deeply influential in her life, they were the sun & moon around which she revolved, even as she went off to day school & beyond.

How our parents believed that hiding their imperfections from us made us safer, I'll never know. Having raised a couple of kids I now know that there sometimes is neither enough energy nor words to explain a crinkle in the fabric of life, still I also know how forgiving children can be. Letting them in on the difficulties of life as well as the joys, takes practice & certainly prepares them for relationships.

This is one wise little book, where the dreams & fantasies a girl invests upon her pen pals: their lives & personalities that, in time, are actually infinitely different & extraordinarily transformative for her when she eventually meets up with them.

So curious that her first pen pal was a girl on the other side of Sydney who ended up in New York running a famous nightclub. That her next pen pal was on the eastern seaboard of America, paralleled her through the riotous 1960s & was destined to fall victim to an insidious disease, bequeathing her mother as a friend for Geraldine. That her two warriors in Israel turned out to give her a rare insight into both sides of that conundrum - an Israeli Jew & a Palestinian Christian. She also muses on how her beloved pen pal in France heralded what her own married life would become.

I loved Foreign Correspondence - Geraldine's sense of wonder, sense of humor, sense of being Australian, of being a girl. Lovely, lovely read!

Also by Geraldine Brooks: Nine Parts of Desire. Brooks is an award-winning foreign corespondent for The Wall Street Journal
(06/12/99)

Rebecca