Van Trinidad tot Kazachstan : het hilarische dagboek van een diplomatenvrouw

by Brigid Keenan, Els Franci-Ekeler (Translator)

Van Tokyo tot Timboektoe zijn er duizenden expatvrouwen, die op de meest onmogelijke plekken in de wereld een leven voor zichzelf moeten proberen op te bouwen. Vrouwen die vaak hun eigen carrière opgeven om hun echtgenoot te volgen. Brigid Keenan is een van hen. Als jonge modejournalist had ze een glansrijke carrière voor de boeg, tot ze verliefd werd op een nogal reislustig type, een diplomaat. Ze liet haar baan voor wat het was en koos voor haan man, waarmee ze de pluchen stoelen in de Parijse salons verruilde voor een onderkomen in een kippenschuur in Nepal. Nu, dertig jaar later, op hun laatste standplaats in Kazachstan, vraagt Brigid zich af of ze destijds wel de juiste keuze heeft gemaakt. Van Trinidad tot Kazachstan is het antwoord: een onweerstaanbare mémoire van het leven als diplomatenvrouw, die in de verste uithoeken van de wereld heeft gewoond en daar met haar man en kinderen de wonderlijkste avonturen beleefde. Van springende reuzenspinnen tot heksendokters en van het wurgende diplomatenprotocol tot intense heimwee.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Memoir, Autobiography, Book Club, Biography, Humor

334 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Brigid Keenan was born in 1939.

Her involvement in fashion began when she joined the Daily Express women's page staff at the start of her career in 1959. Two years later she moved to the Sunday Times where she was responsible for their Young Fashion pages. In 1966 she left the paper to become Assistant Editor of Nova magazine and from there she went to The Observer as Woman's Editor. After a year's break, during which she lived with her husband (a development economist) in Ethiopia, she returned to the Sunday Times as fashion and Beauty Editor. In 1977 she moved to Brussels where she now lives with her husband and two small daughters.

She is a founding board member of the Palestine Festival of Literature.

Reviews

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is exactly the life that I live as an expat. This should be required reading for everyone who desires to live abroad.

Lines that I loved:

Today is my first Monday, the day that every wife of a man working abroad most dreads; the day your husband goes to the office and you have to face your new life alone.

I bolted up here to the attic [away from the maids:] to avoid looking purposeless in front of them, or worst of all, bursting into tears.

I gave up in despair and spent the rest of the day staring into space with wet eyes and feeling murderous hatred for AW, since of course I am only here because of him.

They say, ‘You’ll be okay, Bridge, look how you’ve made a success of all your past postings…’, when all I know is that I’ve been utterly miserable in every one of the six countries across four continents that we’ve been sent o in the last twenty years.

You arrive in each new day all naked (as it were) and friendless and vulnerable, you gradually build up a little world around yourself and then, bingo, you are suddenly sent off to the other side of the world to start all over again.

After three months we each become so used to being independent that no matter how much we have longed for each other in the meantime, being together again is really difficult – we find ourselves resenting our loss of freedom and the demands and interference of the other person.

Sometimes I feel like a large dog waiting all day for its owner to come home and take it out for a walk.

AW is very good at seizing the day.

We ex-pats notice the changes at home far more acutely than people living there all the time.

I need a friend, a kindred spirit; a friend would make everything all right.

All the other wives seem to be fine. Of course they are not. They just put a good face on it.

It’s just because we lead such an insecure gypsy life that I love finding the same cast of characters on our holidays every year.

I find reentering life in England really quite awkward. I feel surprisingly nervous – almost apologetic – telephoning friends to say that I’m home again. Sometimes I find it quite nerve-racking just trying to hold a normal conversation.

Returning home involves more wear and tear of mind and body than any amount of traveling in distant lands. It goes without saying that when you go home, none of your friends are remotely interested in hearing about your life abroad.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

A week after her birth I carried my beautiful daughter, Hester, come in triumph – and then the worst six months of my life began. I don’t know if women now are better prepared for motherhood; but I certainly wasn’t. All my life I’d worked, I’d never really been at home in the daytime, and my friends were all working as well. Suddenly I was home along –no, worse, I was home with a small demanding creature that I had no idea how to placate.

I had, in effect, retired. Soon after we arrived the man next to me at a dinner party asked what I did. This was exactly what I had been wondering myself, but instead of bursting into tears and sobbing, ‘I don’t know, please help me, I used to be a fashion editor, but now… what am I?’, I said, with a false little smile, ‘Well, I suppose I am a housewife.’

I agonized about my role and identity for months, until I slowly came round to the idea that perhaps I had the best of all worlds.

The only way I could get out of bed in the morning was to think of the siesta I could have in the afternoon.

I was plunged into gloom and felt a miserable failure: friends in London seemed to be doing so well, and here I was, clutching at straws...

Nothing in India ever quite worked out how it was intended.

Two rules for ex-pat happiness: one was always have something to do on Mondays, and the other was to make your house feel like home before anything else.

You do learn to behave – and believe – in slightly odd ways when you’ve lived a lot in the developing world.

There is an Arab saying, ‘If you love me, eat.’

It must be nice, not being Ordinary People. I thought about this on the plane going home. The ex-pat’s life with all its homesickness and loneliness and privilege and perks, with its dizzy ups and miserable downs, was certainly not ordinary.

I learned a hard lesson from all of this – never again to interfere in anything to do with AW’s work – but I have to say, when the office is the whole reason for your being in a place, its almost impossible not to be, at the very least, interested in it.

For most of our traveling lives I have been vaguely looking forward to AW’s retirement. Yesterday, for the first time, I realized that it would be closing the door to adventure, and that, once closed, that door might not be easy to open again.

I can’t promise that you will be rich, but I do promise you will never be bored.

[Bookshop · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started off rather annoyingly. The writer begins her tale by describing her misery in the middle of nowhere. While her husband worked, she spent the day crying in desperation and loneliness. Further reading clued me in that she'd been following her husband for 30 years and she was no longer the young, diplomat's wife. In my head, it was tough reconciling a middle-age woman with that kind of whiny, immature attitude.

The subsequent stories are no better: the time line jumps around depending on whatever trivia she happens to remember. A storyline gets lost in the middle of her meandering, meaningless anecdotes. There were numerous names mentioned and needless to say, these names were lost to me too.

The writing style is also strange. I feel like I was reading a blog. I understand that this book is based on the diary she kept but why the inconsistencies between spelling out 'very nice' and shortening it to 'v. nice'? Where's the editor?

Her observations over the richness of human cultures she encountered can be very superficial. People are almost always described by their facial features (I cringed when she described Kazakhstan people of having 'mongoloid' faces). Her activities in the country revolves around managing the helps, arranging diplomatic parties, or restoring buildings. Very typical indeed.

Having said that she's a typical expat wife, it is not necessarily a bad thing. Afterall, it's her experience and she's telling her life as it is.

With that in mind, I begin to enjoy the book a little more. I begin to feel that she doesn't mean any harm. She's just a bumbling, hapless albeit very funny lady. In the end, I decide to be generous and consider this an OK book, fun enough for lazying around on a beach. Unfortunately, the book does reconfirm my prejudices about expat wives.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm really not sure how much of this book can be explained by the British national tendency to self-deprecate, and how much is that this woman really is a useless ditz.

I'm inclined to think it's mostly the former. If one were to go entirely by this memoir taken at face value, this reporter-turned-diplomat's-spouse has spent pretty much her entire life collapsing into tears, shrewishly nagging her husband, ruining dinner parties, and scandalizing the natives of whatever posting she's sent to. Since this isn't Bridget Jones' Diary and she has neither been divorced by her husband nor gotten him fired, I'm going to assume that she's generally a fairly competent person and this endless parade of meltdowns is exaggerated for comic effect.

It's still annoying, though, which is a pity, because she's led a fascinating life. They were in Barbados for the invasion of Grenada, and Ethiopia for the famine. They've lived in Syria and Trinidad and Gambia and Kazakhstan. We don't hear much about the tireless folks working on aid projects and diplomatic postings in the middle of nowhere, and most of us don't have to deal with hippos blocking the mailbox or have opportunities to restore adorable little houses in the Old City of Damascus. She has a lot of fascinating adventures, and if they're somewhat buried in her tales of managing an eccentric assortment of cooks and butlers, well, that's fairly foreign as a concept to me, too. There's a lot of interesting details to take in here. But I spent far too much of the book wanting to shake her, saying "Stop crying and nagging, you ninny--you signed on for this. If you hate this so much, you can go home!"

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is hard to classify - in bookshops it's marketed in the travel section. However, the reality is it's half-way between an autobiography and a travel book - and it fails heavily on both counts. The author isn't that well known, and her life and 'adventures' are not really that interesting to warrant an autobiography. It fails as a travel book - apart from the section on Syria, there really isn't a lot to recommend it. It does, however, give an insight into the life of a diplomat's wife, and is an easy read (so much so, that I also read a couple of other books before I finished it!)

The recommendations on the front cover - "Made me cry from laughing" said Katie Hickman, "Brigid Keenan is a new comic genius... very, very funny" William Dalrymple - were actually written by the author's friends, hence the glowing reviews. Don't be taken in by them... whilst the book does have some funny moments, the 'reviewers' were clearly talking about a different book altogether.

I came across this review which I feel is far closer to the truth: http://www.ciao.co.uk/Diplomatic_Bagg...

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book opens in Kazakhstan, with a chapter from a recent posting of her husband, and then launches into the author's story as a girl, going forward through her nomadic life as a wife and mother. Trouble is: I didn't really care for that first chapter, nor her early life much. However, once they began traveling as a family (two daughters) the (mis)adventures began, and the book gained traction. Unfortunately, the story ended back in Central Asia, which for some reason just wasn't as interesting (again).

I think she and the protagonist of the Provincial Lady books of the 1930's would've got on well together.

[Aisling · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book to read and re-read!! I LOVE this book. The author does a wonderful job of capturing ex-pat highs and lows. I howled with laughter and cried in understanding. I read this book everytime I moved (and if you're an ex-pat you know books are the first thing you jettison in order to make your shipping weight so only VERY special books come along from country to country.) Truly a gem of a find. WAY more than five stars.

[Pania · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, although written by an anti-semite. I learned of an interesting new conspiracy about the lockerby air disaster, its worth reading just for that, plus the bit about the flesh-eating maggots that lived inside her thigh in the Gambia, oooohhh!

[kingshearte · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really didn't care for this book when I started. I was all set to be sympathetic after the introduction, where she talks about how easy it is to look at the sometimes luxurious conditions diplomats live in and not realize how hard it is for the diplomat's family, but then in the first few chapters, it was like she was trying as hard as she could to make me think as little of her as possible.

I could deal with her crying with every new posting, although the way she described it seemed a bit over the top, especially for a presumably 50-or-so-year-old woman who's been doing this for 30 years (and more, perhaps? She later reveals that her father was in the Indian army, and we all know how stationary army families are, right?). But I get it. Just when you've finally started to feel like somewhere is really and truly home, you have to up and leave and go to an entirely new place where you don't know anyone, the culture is totally different, and you may or may not speak the language.

This last, however, was the first thing that drove me mental. The posting to Kazakhstan, where the book begins, is one for which she had a full four months' notice. In four months, you can learn some Russian. Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting you can learn enough to be the next great Russian-language poet, or even to have a particularly in-depth conversation. But surely that's enough time to learn at least some of the basic words you'll need to communicate with your staff? Especially after 30 years. You should be more or less used to having a staff by now, and should know what sorts of things are likely to come up in your dealings with them. But don't arrive in a place after knowing for four months that you were going there, without knowing a single word in their language, and expect me to be sympathetic because you can't communicate. And don't follow that up with a journal entry from a few months later when you still barely know a word. At this point, I seriously wanted to smack her.

I also rolled my eyes pretty hard when she complained about not knowing anyone, and in the next sentence declared that she didn't care for the organized activities available to the diplomatic wives. She was like the kid who rejects half a dozen activities, and then declares itself bored.

Anyway, once we got past that stuff, it wasn't so bad. She seemed to more or less acclimate wherever they went despite herself, and even made friends, and then the story just became a series of ridiculous adventures. Here too, though, I didn't find it nearly as hilarious as I might have hoped. I realize that the humdrum details of life do not make for particularly entertaining reading, so the "hilarious mishap" takes on the starring role, but really, there's only so much incompetence one can take before it just becomes tiresome. I think part of the problem is that it comes across here as a bit "tee-hee, I'm just a girl. Aren't I silly?" and that is something for which I've never had any patience (thank you, Mom & Da), so instead of being endearing, as is often the point with this sort of thing, it was just irritating. But like I said, it wasn't so bad. The adventures, when she wasn't just being stupid, were very much on a par with stories I've heard from the diplomat or two I've encountered. Her attempts to make things better for some of the people she encountered were indeed quite touching sometimes, and really drove home the fact that although yes, one person can make a difference, one person can't do it all and can't solve the whole problem, no matter how much she might want to.

In the end, she does come full circle, and you start to understand why she wallowed in so much misery at the beginning: so she can juxtapose it with journal entries from later in that same posting, when she starts to find her feet, which is precisely her point. She started writing this book after being asked by a new diplomat's wife about whether the sacrifices were worth it, and while I suspect that answer is probably different for everyone (I, for one, am not living in a place with giant jumping spiders not matter how much I love my husband.), I think that ultimately, she did a pretty good job of answering that question. I'd be interested in knowing what decision that other wife ended up making, but that would be her story.

[Tulika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brigid Keenan a fashion editor of the Sunday Times marries a diplomat and follows him across the world through the most diverse countries one can imagine from Ethiopia to Gambia, India to Nepal and Kazakhastan.

The first few pages put me off a bit because all she talks of is what a hard life she has, how lonely she was and how very homesick. True as that may be, it is tough for anyone else to sympathise with her without a proper background - an ambassador's wife, to an outsider, is after all a privileged person.

The book improves over the pages as we get a glimpse of her life through various countries as also her personal trials and travails, which I can imagine must have been aplenty. One can end up feeling lost and inadequate, uprooted from home and family. Moreso when one has to almost singlehandedly deal with all kinds of difficult social situations in strange lands.

I ended up empathising with her because the book (in my mind) turned into a blog - very personal and honest. Keenan doesn't shy away from laughing at herself, admitting her shortcomings - her love for shopping, the panic at hosting parties, the tough times with her daughters - all of that made her human and identifiable. Her experiences in Ethiopia were heart wrenching.

On the flip side (again) there were just too many names to contend with, a lot of them unrecognisable and I lost track of who's who after a point.

In the end, I'll say, read it like you'd read an expat's diary and you won't be disappointed.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was worried that I would hate this book because the author was grating on my last nerve in the first fifty pages. However, after that, I ended up loving her. Yeah, she's a little nuts. But wouldn't you be if you followed your husband from India to Barbados to Gambia to Syria and so on? If she didn't embellish the stories, she's had one hell of a life as an expat. Even if she did embellish! I found myself laughing out loud at times, and I don't really laugh out loud too much when reading. Her stories were comical and yet incredibly poignant at times. It takes a brave soul to move to the places she did. I really don't think I would want to do it, but I'm glad to have read her wittily written tale of her experiences.

[Heatheremerick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because it looked a like the author and I would have a lot in common. It is a decent read but I think she is pretty out of touch and as some other reviewers have said, sometimes offensive! There is enough in here for me to say that if you are curious about the diplomatic life, this will give you a glimpse, a weird glimpse, but a glimpse none the less.

[Colleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

So....I have FINALLY finished this book. What a chore! It took me about six months.

It is the story of a 'trailing spouse' otherwise known as an expat wife. Holding that esteemed title myself, I thought I might find the author easy to identify with. As it turns out, her life as an expat was very different than mine. She has lived in some very remote and underdeveloped regions...and I really couldn't identify with those experiences. I could relate to the lonliness one feels when first arriving in a new country where one doesn't speak the language..but that was as far as the similarities went.

I also felt that the author seemed to lack a connection to her children. They weren't a very large part of the story being told, and they went off to bording schools in the UK from quite a young age. therefore I REALLY couldn't relate to the author as a mother.

The reviews for this book painted a picture of hilarity. My expectations were set high. In fact, I think I may have laughed twice during the entire 300 page book.

The book was written by a Brit...perhaps British humour is just lost on me?

All in all, not one I would recommend.

[Sonya Dutta Choudhury · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first heard Brigid Keenan speak at the Jaipur Literary Festival last year, and was captivated . This year she was at jaipur again, getting lots of laughs with her self deprecatory wit . I promptly bought her second book ( Further Travels of a Trailing spouse - the first wasn't available at the Jaipur bookshop) Then because my friend Priya told me Diplomatic Baggage was much better, I ordered that too, through Amazon.

Diplomatic Baggage is fun, in a grown up Brigid Jones turned wife kind of way . There's a little bit of background scenery too - like Almaty in Kazakistan or New Delhi in India. But its not very much and its mostly confined to maids, bearers , cooks and other household help. Of course this is what the life of a trailing diplomatic spouse is like - and Keenan tells us about her bouts of homesickness, her tears , being revived , visiting bazaars and such like . Not much about anybody else- from AW the diplomat to Keenan's two daughters . Disapointing and I shan't read the sequel .

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some very interesting and hilarious stories, but her unmistakable upper-class background (her father was brigadier-general in the Indian army) and the fact that she's constantly trying to make out that she's just an "ordinary" person, gets quite annoying, as does the repeated name-dropping. Whilst she seems intent on convincing the reader of the contrary, she comes across as having spent most of her time abroad either organising, (with the help of cook, housemaid and butler) or attending, dinner parties, so it is difficult to feel any sympathy for the "hardships" she claims to have lived through.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining read! But ... How do you say this politely? The author would probably be an interesting friend except she is so ditsy, so untalented on the home front, almost narcissistic-and we have all known people just like her. The rest of us just shake our heads and carry on with our usual competent lives while they go around creating emergencies-unnecessary emergencies. I have read it twice because once you figure out she is ditsy she has led an interesting life.

[Katrin V · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keenan does a great job of humouressly spotlighting cultural differences and in a self-deprecating manner relates how she frequently grew to like places and people she didn't immediately take a shine to. I laughed out loud every few pages, but in some ways found the book unsatisfying. I wonder how much of the Syria she knew will be left for anyone else to enjoy which gave the Syria chapter a particularly poignant feel.

[Wilde Sky · Rating 3 out of 5]

A woman describes her life as a diplomat’s wife.

Initially I found the author annoying but about half way through I started to warm to her (slightly) – in that she’d tried to make things better. Overall I couldn’t get over my sense of the British class system being the deciding factor on who got what opportunity.

Probably only one for people that ‎send their kids to private schools.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keenan is married to a diplomat, known in the trade as a trailing spouse. She's followed her husband to various postings in such countries as Syria, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan. This is her memoir as she reminisces about their life together, the adventures they've had and the people they've met. Fascinating look at various cultures.

[Puji Sitorus]

Funny and real :)

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you ever want to know what it REALLY feels like to follow a working spouse into a different culture... Read chapter one. I could relate and laughed so hard it hurt.

Everyone told us that ex-pat life is really rough the first six months... but then you 'get it' and can really enjoy the time. It is true, that especially the first 3 months .. that as i sent emails to friends and family, i cried so hard into my laptop that i feared it may short circuit. Now 9 months later, i am really enjoying life... and finding the 'balance in life' that i have always been searching for.

I imagine that it is true... when it comes time to return to the USA permanently... I will miss it here too. And as i move on to the next opportunities life presents, I will be stonger for my time here and have fond memories of life as an ex-pat spouse.


Author: Brigid Keenan
Publisher: John Murray
Copyright: 2005
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 292
Date Read- 4/22/08 - 4/23/08



NOTES
_________________
p.12
It is a fact, tha an ex-patriate wife feels like an appendage.
Indeed we are officially known by the people who employ our husbands as 'trailing spouses'. We trail along behind, we have no identities of our own- we are only in Central Asia, India, Africa, Europe or wherever, because of our husbands.
We may be engineers, pharmacists, journalists, business women , experts in antiques, genetics, but when we meet each other we don't say 'What do you do?'- we ask what each others HUSBAND's job is....Since usually we can't earn our own money, we have to ask our husbands every time we want to spend some.

Sometimes i feel like a large dog waiting all day for its owner to come home and take it out for a walk. When i hear my husband's key in the lock I have an urge to rush downstairs barking and jumping up and down to lick his face.

Women are less inclined to sacrifice themselves on the altars of their husbands ambitions. It's ok for the husbands- they go to their offices and work at more or less the same sort of thing whether they are in Jakarta or Japan. But we women are left on our own, widely casting around for some sort of role for ourselves which isn't just playing golf or bridge, and having to fall back on our own inner resources- which in my case is rather painful as i fell they are a bit sparse.

p. 118
I agonized about my role and identity for months, until I slowly came around to the idea that I had perhaps the best of both worlds.

p. 125
Brussels, as we ex-pats were fond of saying, was also- still is- a wonderful town to get out of: all of Europe was at our doorstep.

p. 198
The moment i heard we were leaving, I was seized by a shopping mania; you'd have thought there was nothing to be bought in any other country. It is obvious it has something to do with the insecurity of moving. I suddenly realized why friends home were cluttered with strange nick-knacks. They are departing purchases from departing ex-pats.

p. 211
An old hand in India once gave me two rules for ex-pat happiness: one was 'Always Have Something to do on Mondays', and the other was 'Make Your House Feel Like Home Before Anything Else.'


To see: Hotel Solvang (Ave Louise) & Brussels Auction House

[PurplyCookie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brigid used to be a fashion journalist in London until she fell in love with her now diplomat husband. She becomes uprooted from her familiar surroundings and transplanted to the different countries her husband gets assigned to.

She shows that being an ex-patriate's wife is not as glamorous and prestigious as we all thought they are; instead the author presents us with an endlessly engaging tale of diplomatic protocol, difficult teenagers, homesickness, frustrated career aspirations, and language barriers.

As a traveler myself, I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to have an author recall her experiences--in a hilarious and very realistic manner. There is no sugar coating in this book--whether the author is discussing the taste of the food of a certain country to that of the language barrier she has encountered to the unpleasant surprises that may just spring on you. You do not need to be a "trailing spouse" like she was to appreciate the predicaments she often finds herself in. She is able to laugh at herself unconsciously when there is a diplomatic faux pas or cultural hiccup along the way.

Overall, her rich experiences make the book a gripping travelogue as she moves across continents from Europe, to Africa, to the Caribbean and to Central Asia.


Book Details:

Title Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse
Author Brigid Keenan
Reviewed By Purplycookie

[Véronique Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brigid Keenan is a British journalist married to a diplomat from the European Commission. In this book full of humor and anecdotes, she describes her trailing spouse life from the seventies to early two thousands. This is then more than thirty years of expat life that she explains with many details by rising to the surface moments of happiness but also of doubts. Every expat women will recognize themselves in this lively testimonial because the author sums up well what is the trailing spouse problematic: what about her professional life? How to raise children and then teens in this context? How to help aging and old parents when you are living extremely far away from them? How to deal daily with cultural differences? Cause if the expat life is a wealthy one (financially and intellectually), it is still a much more complicated life than if you were stayed in your home country.
“Diplomatic Baggage” must then be read by all those who since a long time follow their spouse all around the world. The less experimented ones must stay critical and keep in mind that this is only a specific experience, the one of Brigid Keenan. Relocation abroad in a specific country can be lived very differently from two different people.
The moral of the story is that a relocation abroad as a trailing spouse is successful when you become the main character of it, when you are able to make forget to others that you are the “spouse of”. This is an accomplished mission for Brigid.

[Katie O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

So funny and honest and insightful that I didn't mind that I wasn't actually doing all the expat adventuring. In fact, I think I didn't miss it because her writing made me feel as if I were there. Well, almost. The family did it all: mud hut mission-style service to ambassadorial pomp. The impressive variety of cultures in which they were immersed was quite head-spinning at times - kind of like being in the midst of some multicultural, older-than-time, city square market with characters galore all vying for your attention.

Mostly, it was a fun, zippy read with some heft. She answers life's questions (is the sacrifice of my personal career worth all this? what benefit/price to my children growing up across time zones and economic realities? would I do it all again? what important impact can I have amidst all this when I'm legally barred from employment?). She provides answers with only-if-you'd-been-there details at every turn. Yes, she glides over what were some very trying/scary times with some rebellious daughters. And I couldn't quite warm to her sometimes attitude/habits with 'the help' (nothing nasty, perhaps just a bit of accepting their obsequiousness par for the course). But mostly I loved it.

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and hilarious book. Brigid Keenan seems to have the most astounding luck - good and bad - and she writes about it with wit and honesty. She recounts the adventures of her life as a diplomatic wife in an easy, engaging style that had me laughing out loud on every page. This book is therapy and an education combined. Even as I ached in sympathy for her traumatic moments and marveled at her composure, I was ready to pack my bags and sign up with the State Department.

[Sephie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has been criticised as "smacking of colonial fogie-ism" but this is an excellent insight for the armchair traveller and entertainingly written. Yes, there's lots of name-dropping, but those were the circles in which the author lived.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book which has had more good than bad reviews.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I'd write this book when I came to Quito, but here she's done it for me. Side splitting tales of "adventure" and embarassment. I was crying from laughing. The magic dwindles about 3/4 of the way though, but still well worth the read for those of us who create entirely new identities every other year.

[Gail · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mereke gave this book a 3.5.......so i'm giving it a 2.5 and the reason is that i did laugh out loud, but not as often as the book jacket would lead you to believe and in the end, it's cute and ok, but really nothing special. I actually got bored and just wanted it to end. Self deprecating humor only gets you so far.

[Lisa Dyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of a trailing ex-pat wife was right down my alley. I also keep a blog of my experiences, though to put it together in a book such as this does not have the usual flow of a novel, just a collection of humorous anecdotes and stories.

I could really see many ILV ladies in this memoir and loved to hear her travel stories from many countries in Asia/Africa.

[Doriana Bisegna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very amusing account of Ms Kennan's travels to some pretty "out there" places as a diplomat's wife. Her honesty and British wit shone through on every page. Truly enjoyed reading about all the people she met, the hairy situations she would get into and her capacity to blend right in with the culture of the place.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite my earlier complaints that Brigid Keenan always complained, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a light and compelling read. I really liked her commentary on each place she lived in and the people she met. Every few pages had me chuckling at a dry and unexpected thought or situation. 4.5 stars!