Girl Without A Zip Code

by Pamela Gwyn Kripke

A memoir of home, motherhood, love and loss, Girl Without a Zip Code traces the trip back to New York City after seventeen difficult years in Texas. Pamela Gwyn Kripke, a journalist, writes about the personal and physical journey home in a pink notebook, while riding the Number Four train to Brooklyn. At once humorous and poignant, the book takes a quirky look at place, family and belonging.

134 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 17, 2018

About the author

I'm so glad that you found me. Welcome, and thank you for reading my work.

For a couple of decades, I've been a journalist, covering all sorts of stories in all sorts of places. From Biloxi, Mississippi, to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Dallas, I've written features and news stories for publications including The New York Times, The New York Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Slate, Salon and The Huffington Post, among many other newspapers and magazines. All along, I've written personal essays, and I had the good fortune of being nominated for a Pulitzer for Opinion writing in 2010.

My first novel, At the Seams, will be published by Open Books later in 2023. It's a story of family secrets, four generations of women and an inquisitive eight-year-old who learns how far people go to protect the ones they love.

My first book, Girl Without a Zip Code, is a quirky and poignant memoir of home, motherhood, time and love. Not to mention a dog. Charlie. A Texan making his way in Manhattan. The book is dedicated to my two daughters, inspiring young people who have shaped me in wonderful ways.

Check back for At the Seams news, pre-order information and fun giveaways to come. And, as always, thank you for reading.

Reviews

[Ellen Behrens · Rating 5 out of 5]

What compels a person to move halfway across the country? What compels a person to move from one extreme to another -- like, say, from Texas to New York City? What makes a place home, anyway? Pamela Gwyn Kripke can help you out with that, and this is the book she offers.

Written during NYC commutes via city bus (she has an aversion to the subway) in a "hot pink fake leather notebook," Kripke describes fellow riders, her moves, the differences between Texas and New York, and how it could be that a New Yorker could miss country music.

I enjoyed this book a lot, especially Kripke's ability to spill whatever's on her mind into that notebook, then her courage to publish it for the rest of us to read. The inspiration is in her language, her ability to take something mundane like, "country music has its particular tropes" and turn it into this: "I giggle as choruses of tractor-riding and beer-drinking and cut-off-shorts-wearing sail out my open windows into those of the fancy private school next door."

And her take on parenting is spot-on: "If you don't do it correctly, if you are not the best parent, if you loosen up for just a second, you may meet catastrophe. You fear that your kids will lose out, that they will be dented and scarred and torn up."

But most of her book is about the relocation from one place to another, the adaption to the new place. Having just settled into a house after roaming the continent in an RV for 15 years, I was especially captured by this: "When time passes and you don't move, you don't pack up things and traipse, you don't have some physical journey, then the time passes without notice. It creeps and oozes and happens. It just happens all by itself."

So what is home? It's where you make experiences. For Kripke, it's where the memories are, and where they are being made. Sounds about right to me.