Growing Up Global

A review of Geraldine Brooks’ Foreign Correspondence
by Alison Koentje

Geraldine Brooks. Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over. Anchor, 1999. 217 pp., $13.95 (paper).

For readers whose lives are consumed with text messages, email and AIM, it may be hard to appreciate a memoir like Geraldine Brooks’ Foreign Correspondence centered on the art of writing letters. But teenage angst and awkwardness transcend all communication mediums, and Brooks successfully conveys the universal longing to be someone else, somewhere else. Through her memoir readers see a writer blossom as a precocious little girl with a pen-pal obsession becomes a highly respected Middle East foreign correspondent and later, a critically acclaimed novelist—transformations, Brooks would have you believe, that hinge on putting the pen to paper.

Now a Pulitzer prize-winning author, Brooks’ origins were relatively humble: a sickly girl growing up in the humdrum Sydney suburbs of the 1960’s and 70’s, suffering from “Cultural Cringe—the Australian belief that just about anybody anywhere did things better that we did,” she longed to be a part of a more cosmopolitan world. Growing up under Menzies, an Anglophile president, didn’t help. Through the epistolary form (a medium that many now claim dead or dying), young Brooks reaches out to the world.

Brooks’ father, Laurie, is an American expatriate with an enigmatic past. His own frequent mail correspondence (recipients ranged from a local news columnist to Albert Einstein) inspired Brooks to do the same. a gesture she hoped would bring them closer together. The precocious and lonely child writes letters to better understand the world outside Australia and to connect with the world her father once inhabited: “I wanted,” she writes, “to learn something about the world my father had inhabited when he was my age.” But her father’s private inner life and secrets are something she must wait to discover later on. While nursing her father through his final days, the adult Brooks re-discovers her letters and the childhood self who sought to escape her “average” life in Sydney’s suburbs.

Brooks’ initial correspondent is Sonny, daughter of a popular newspaper columnist growing up in the affluent suburb of North Shore nearby. Though Sonny shows her “that pen-friendship allow[s] the bridging of otherwise unbridgeable spaces”, offering her a new perspective on the world, their correspondence dwindles as Sonny immerses herself in theatre, ballet, acting and the like. Next, Brooks writes to an American girl named Joannie, who shares her obsession with all things Star Trek. The two girls hit it off, exchanging weekly letters, often laden with Vulcan sayings and anti-Vietnam messages. In one letter Joannie describes her constant fear of nuclear attack: “Last night around eleven fifteen P.M. the whole sky lit up all pale orange for a few seconds and then there came the loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard…I was so sure of [the bomb being dropped] that I was almost wondering to myself, ‘How much longer am I going to be alive?’” Such personal disclosures enable them become and remain best friends over the years. Her experience with Joannie becomes the fulcrum of the memoir.

Brooks’ interest in her father’s Zionist beliefs lead her to a third pen-pal, an Israeli Arab named Mishal. But, much to her dismay, Mishal doesn’t live on a kibbutz and is a Christian. She writes again to the pen-pal service that connected her to Mishal, explicitly listing “Judaism” as one her interests. The new correspondent, Cohen, turns out to be dull, interested only in sports and the beach—“the same dreary subjects that obsessed the Aussie youth to whom I wouldn’t give the time of day.” What is most striking about the young Brooks is her political zeal and awareness, her high level of social inquiry and discourse. She reads Leon Uris and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and gives passionate orations justifying the 1948 Israeli War of Independence in her English class. Her penchant for the political, religious and social lead her to Mishal and Cohen, and later, to the Middle East where she will make a name for herself as a foreign correspondent.

Just as her interest in Judaism led her to Mishal and Cohen, a young Brooks’ appreciation of French art—the paintings of Cezanne, the sculptures of Rodin— coupled with her growing feelings of distaste for “the bourgeois values of my backwater country” leads her to the French Janine, someone she envisions “hurling cobblestones by day and retreating to an intimate Left bank brasserie” by night. The young writer’s assumptions are a bit skewed: she is surprised to discover that Janine--no Maoist student radical of Paris--is a peasant girl from a town so small it’s not named on the map. But Brooks needs a decade of maturation and traveling before she can appreciate Janine’s simple life.

In the memoir’s second part, we meet Brooks as an adult: a successful foreign correspondent for various international publications. Married to a Jewish American, she converts to Judaism. While nursing her ailing father in Sydney, the journalistic impulse strikes and Brooks determines to see where Sonny, Mishal, Cohen and Janine ended up nearly twenty years after the onset of their correspondences.

Foreign Correspondence is well-written and humorous; its intimate feel enhanced by the personal photographs in the middle of the book. Any memoirist runs the risk of lapsing into self-indulgence. Brooks resists this temptation; Foreign Correspondence is a finely crafted bildunsroman, capturing the author’s life-long journey into knowledge—a gradual move from cultural misappraisal, filial mysteries and self-doubt. Within her personal narrative Brooks places modest jewels of wisdom that expand the book’s breadth, giving it a scope that’s bigger than her personal history: “Reporters look for the quotable people, the articulate . . . Meanwhile, real life is happening elsewhere, in the middle, among the Mishals and the Cohens, who care more about their families and jobs than ideology.”

Part of the book’s success is Brooks’ balanced narrative structure: Part One introducing Brooks’ childhood and the pen-pals, Part Two mapping her transition into adulthood and her rediscovery of the lost correspondents. Brooks wrote Foreign Correspondence in between her nonfiction literary debut, The Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and a number of critically acclaimed historical novels, including the Pulitzer prize-winning March. In it, she writes that “To be a witness to the extremity of human behavior, you have to pay the price of admission.” For Brooks, that admission has been paid. Her simple yet gripping memoir is a gift to readers and possible future writers, especially young women. (The memoir won the 1999 Nita B. Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers). Brooks’ continued thirst for experience, education and cultural awareness are awe-inspiring.

In these dark times of ethnocentrism and xenophobia, Brook’s memoir gently urges us to get outside ourselves and see the world—to use writing as a connection to the world.


Alison J. Koentje is an Interdisciplinary English and Writing Major with a Minor in Gender Studies. A member of the English Honor Society (Sigma Tau Delta), the Writing Honor Society (Pi Epsilon Pi), Phi Beta Kappa, and the National Jesuit Honor Society (Alpha Sigma Nu), Alison is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Forum, Loyola's nonfiction literary magazine and currently interns at Mason-Dixon ARRIVE, an upscale monthly magazine that focuses on the Chesapeake lifestyle.