Embassy Kid: An American Foreign Service Family Memoir

by J.K. Amerson López, Camila Acosta Sánchez (Illustrator)

Caracas, 1958: A revolution sends a reviled dictator into exile, and Vice President Nixon is attacked by a murderous mob.

Rome, 1963: President Kennedy gets a rock star reception as he tours the Eternal City.

Bogotá, 1966: A Marine Security Guard discovers a bomb in an embassy office minutes before it is set to explode.

Madrid, 1972: Fire engulfs the family’s home. Post to post, languages morph, school systems change, and friends vanish into the past. Everyplace is home, but not for long. America, it turns out, is the most foreign post of all.

Embassy An American Foreign Service Family Memoir follows Robert and Nancy Amerson, a courageous couple from the American Heartland, and their two daughters as they carry out the mission of the US Information Agency to “win hearts and minds for democracy” in Latin America and Europe during the Cold War. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Foreign Service, Embassy Kid pays timely tribute to our diplomats and their families who sacrifice safety, security, and stability while representing America thousands of miles from home.

J.K. Amerson López, the oldest Amerson daughter, is the narrator of Embassy Kid, her publishing debut. López’s second memoir is Amsterdam Strong, the story of her near-fatal illness on a cruise, the remarkable Dutch doctors who saved her, and her miraculous return to full health. López lives in South Florida with her husband and their rescue Lab and therapy dog, Kumba.

324 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2025

Reviews

[Kathleen Gamble · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book follows the life of a US Foreign Service family as they are posted to Latin America and Western Europe during the Cold War years. Written from the eldest child’s perspective, she has to constantly conform and blend in. There is a lot of pressure on her to perform as her family thinks she should. I think this book tells an honest story of what it is like to grow up the daughter of a diplomat. There are perks and there are downsides. Always being under the Embassy bubble can take its toll. The author does a good job of describing her life and the book kept my attention and interest throughout.

[James Nehring · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amerson Lopez’s memoir about growing up as a U.S. foreign service kid is a remarkable account of a family living a paradox. It is a highly readable true-story, rendered with the drama, subtlety, and emotional truth of a novel that grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go. Mom, Dad, Jane, and sister
Susie, play a role as official representatives of American culture through the height of the Cold War, a traveling tableau of the ideal American family on display for the natives at posts in Caracas, Bogota, Rome, Madrid. But the longer the family lives abroad, the more they fall out of touch with an American culture in decline. Amerson Lopez captures this paradox with her descriptions of a family that leans closely on one another and love each other deeply, as the children benefit from the privileged life of an American diplomat’s family. The contrast is served up in relief during a spell of several years when the family moves stateside. The girls attend a too-big public high school with cheerleaders and jocks. Family time together—meals, museums, Sunday rides in the country—evaporate, as the kids are pulled into the silliness of American teen culture and Mom experiences a creeping ennui as suburban housewife. They observe an America that is overweight and under-informed, self-absorbed and clueless about the world beyond its border. The girls are forced to hide their worldliness lest they appear uppity to their monolingual, infantilized American peers. When the family resumes their overseas life with a plum post in Madrid, they find each other again, and, with considerable relief, re-assume the life they’ve learned to love.
Amerson Lopez is a skillful writer revealing the book’s central paradox with a tender but honest and insightful rendering of her own childhood and coming of age. The prose gallops along and family life is set dramatically against the backdrop of unfolding global events and local politics in each country and city where they land, sometimes for months, sometimes for years.
There’s just so much here. The story opens at the height of a period in which a foreign service officer’s wife was expected to play the role of social coordinator, primary caregiver for the children, and tender of the American ideal family. This Eisenhower era expectation finds itself up against second wave feminism toward the end of the book. Writing fifty years later, Amerson-Lopez frames this both critically and sympathetically. Her mother is strong, but also of an era. Meanwhile, Dad, too, is a fully-dimensional character. He is a smart, capable, and loyal company man, but also a tender parent, more emotionally engaged than many middle class men of his time. There are also trips to the American heartland, visits with relatives, the people from which this earnest family springs, Nordic immigrants who farm the Midwest. As the book unfolds one laments how this better angel of America’s nature is losing in its tug-of-war with the culture of the suburban shopping mall.
Embassy Kid offers a unique and impressive insider-outsider view of America during the cold war, a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand American soft power over three crucial decades and how those decades shaped American culture. But the real pull of this book is that it tells a great story of a resilient family.

[Al Pessin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Embassy Kid is a touching, poignant memoir with relevance that spans the decades to our own time. The work of our diplomats and their families, and the positive and negative impacts of the international nomad lifestyle, shine through the story built partly around historic events the author and her family experienced—the flight of a dictator, an attack on the U.S. vice-president, a handshake with John F. Kennedy. (“Kids in the foreign service know how to shake hands.”) It’s that sort of hands-on contact representing America to people around the world that sent young Jane Amerson (now JK Amerson Lopez) and her family on their decades-long journey through six countries, plus, sometimes most difficult of all for an international child, the United States. It’s the type of journey traveled by thousands of foreign service and military families to this day. And you don’t have cross any borders to appreciate the highs and lows of moving house, changing schools, and making new friends, which so many families do without ever leaving the country. As the author writes of her first traumatic move just shy of age five, “I sat there, hands folded on my lap, doing what the adults expected of me. ... In a process that I would repeat seven times in the years to come, I relinquished my hold on the present. When it came time to go, you simply went.” Embassy Kid is a beautifully written (and illustrated), fact-based, relatable tale of service, family, and survival. Don’t miss it!

[Ellen Sutherland · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding memoir about a family serving their country in six countries, adapting to different cultures and languages. The author tells of the glamor in meeting dignitaries, traveling to places most only dream of but she is also very honest about the impact of and dedication to the family.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging look at what it was like to grow up as a diplomat's child in the 1950s and 1960s, moving between countries, languages and school systems and all the while being very aware of your parents' political positions.