Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, where she reported on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa. A native of Australia and a graduate of Sydney University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she currently lives in Virginia with her husband and young son.

As Brooks tells it, “Unless civil war breaks out for a second time in Virginia, it is unlikely that I will ever see a battlefield again. These days I don’t cover uprisings or get arrested on suspicion of espionage. I bake bread, piece quilts, turn the compost heap, and sit on the porch, rocking my son to sleep.… A letter can find me here with just the name of the village as an address.”

Show and Tell

Foreign Correspondence is a different kind of memoir, much of its light coming from the reflection of what the author learns of those she rediscovers. To this end, your book group may want to add another dimension to your discussion. No doubt your group has members who, when they were young, corresponded with kids in the United States or in other parts of the world. Perhaps some of your members have saved those letters, the same way Brooks’s father did, and are willing to share them with the group. Part of your discussion of Foreign Correspondence may be your own stories of trying to track down former pen pals or simply rereading those letters for insight into the young girl or boy that you were.

Questions for Discussion

1. Discuss Brooks’s choice to structure the book in two parts and not to tell the story in straight chronology. What are the benefits of these choices? Are there any drawbacks?

2. In what ways did the geography of place affect Brooks?

3. Brooks was an outsider, a loner, an observer—as shown by events ranging from her childhood rheumatic fever, which often separated her from schoolmates, to living “down under,” to coming of age on the cusp of the feminist movement. Is this feeling of “otherness” essential to a writer? To this writer?

4. Brooks writes, “In every urban family’s history, there is a generation that loses its contact with the land.” Do you think there is more dissonance between the generations that are on either side of this loss than there is to generations farther away from it? Can you pinpoint the time in your family history where your family lost contact with the land? How has it affected your family?

5. Australians have an instinctual need to leave their island and explore the world. Discuss this as a theme in Brooks’s memoir.

6. Australian men have a deep and particular relationship with their male friends, their mates, as described by Brooks and others. Compare and contrast this with the idea of women’s friendships in the United States, which are often cited as different and deeper than men’s friendships.

7. Discuss Brooks’s religious upbringing and why you think she converted to Judaism. Did her childhood experiences foreshadow the conversion to come?

8. Brooks comes to a gradual realization that Australia is not so small a place after all. How does this compare or contrast with American myths of exploration and home?

9. In what ways does the Australian “Cultural Cringe” syndrome mirror the more personal cringe that many children, especially teens, feel about their parents and their brothers or sisters?

10. Brooks writes that she “had more years of shared confidences with Joannie than with any of my mates in Sydney.” Would their relationship have been less important if they had not developed it through writing only? In what ways? In your experience, does the act of writing letters make a friendship stronger?

11. Do you think e-mail has changed the pen pal experience for kids? In what ways?

12. Assume you have to choose one or the other, which is preferable—to grow up in a restricted environment with no car, with no travel, and with curfews and strict limits? Or to travel widely and experience many different cultures and have more responsibility and opportunity at an earlier age? Talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each.

13. Discuss Brooks’s identification with Joannie—her observation that she’s living the life Joannie was meant to lead.

14. Does Brooks follow or disregard (personally and professionally) the advice she received from a veteran correspondent: “Never get in the middle. You have to choose your side.” How does the author feel about the middle?

15. When Brooks is in the French village of St. Martin, visiting Janine, do you suspect that she will ultimately identify so strongly with her?

16. Brooks confesses that she felt an “inevitability” about leaving Australia. Do you also think it’s inevitable that she’ll go back and live in Australia with her husband and son?

17. Brooks’s father kept secrets from her for a long time. How might she have felt if she learned about her father’s other daughter at an earlier age? Do you think he made the right choice in keeping it from her for so long?

18. Talk about the “happiness set point.” In what ways do you essentially agree with or question this theory of human behavior?

Recommended Reading

Atwood, Margaret, Cat’s Eye

Bateson, Mary Catherine, With a Daughter’s Eye

Beard, Jo Ann, The Boys of My Youth

Blackburn, Julia, Daisy Bates in the Desert

Bloom, Amy, Love Invents Us

Carey, Peter, Oscar and Lucinda

Carr, Mary, Liars’ Club

Cather, Willa, O Pioneers

Chang, Pang-Me Natasha, Bound Feet and Western Dress

Chatwin, Bruce, The Songlines

Cisneros, Sandra, The House on Mango Street

Conway, Jill Ker, The Road from Coorain

Cooper, J. California, In Search of Satisfaction

Dillard, Annie, An American Childhood

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, The Mistress of Spices

Eliot, George, Middlemarch

Hamilton, Jane, The Book of Ruth

James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady

Munro, Alice, The Beggar Maid

Shigekuni, Julie, A Bridge Between Us

Ordering Information

Reading group support materials are available to support a vast array of interesting books from Anchor Books. To obtain information on reading guides, please call the Doubleday Marketing Hotline at 1-800-605-3406.

Reading Group Companion Guides now available from Anchor Books (subject to change):

ALIAS GRACE by Margaret Atwood

ANNE FRANK: The Diary of a Young Girl