The holiday season can be stressful under even the best circumstances. If you’ve been managing a major move, navigating confusing new social situations, and figuring out local vs. long-distance gift-giving on top of all the usual hubbub? You definitely deserve to treat yourself, too.
Wouldn’t it feel decadent to curl up with a good book? Are you in the mood for something educational or escapist? Rational or romantic? Historical or how-to? How about all of the above, while also celebrating trailing spouse life? Here are my top five book recommendations so far, with summaries and image links via GoodReads.
My Life in France by Julia Child & Alex Prud’Homme
The bestselling story of Julia’s years in France — and the basis for Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams — in her own words.
Although she would later singlehandedly create a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, Julia Child was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching.
Julia’s unforgettable story — struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly 50-year long marriage that took the Childs across the globe — unfolds with the spirit so key to Julia’s success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of America’s most endearing personalities.
Diplomatic Baggage by Brigid Keenan
When Sunday Times fashion journalist Brigid Keenan married the love of her life in the late Sixties, little idea did she have of the rollercoaster journey they would make around the world together — with most things going horribly awry while being obliged to keep the straightest face and put their best feet forward.
For he was a diplomat — and Brigid found herself the smiling face of the European Union in locales ranging from Kazakhstan to Trinidad. Finding herself miserable for the first time in a career into which many would have long ago thrown the towel, she found herself asking (during a farewell party for the Papal Nuncio): was it worth it?
As this stream of it-really-happened-to-me stories shows, it most certainly was – if only for our vicarious bewilderment at how exactly you throw a buffet dinner during a public mourning period in Syria, remain viable as a fashion journalist when taste-wise you are three seasons out of it and geographically a world away, make people believe that there are actually terrible things going on in paradise, be a good mother AND save some of the finest architecture in Damascus and Brussels from demolition — seemingly all simultaneously.
Packing Up: Further Adventures of a Trailing Spouse by Brigid Keenan
Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling account of life as a “trailing spouse,” Diplomatic Baggage, won the hearts of thousands in countries all over the world.
Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme disease from ticks, the local delicacy is horse meat sausage, and Brigid’s visit to a market leads to a full-scale riot from which she requires a police escort. Then, as the prospect of retirement looms, Brigid finds herself on the cusp of a whole new world: shuttling between London, Brussels, and their last posting in Azerbaijan; navigating her daughters’ weddings while coping with a cancer diagnosis; and getting a crash course in grandmotherhood as she helps organize a literature festival in Palestine.
Along the way, dauntless and wildly funny as ever, Brigid learns that packing up doesn’t mean packing in as she discovers that retiring and moving back home could just be her biggest challenge yet.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America — the first African American to serve in that role — she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her — from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it — in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations — and whose story inspires us to do the same.
Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing by Alan Paul
Alan Paul, award–winning author of the Wall Street Journal’s online column “The Expat Life,” gives his engaging, inspiring, and unforgettable memoir of blues and new beginnings in Beijing. Paul’s three-and-a-half-year journey reinventing himself as an American expat — while raising a family and starting the revolutionary blues band Woodie Alan, voted Beijing Band of the Year in the 2008 — is a must-read adventure for anyone who has lived abroad, and for everyone who dreams of rewriting the story of their own future.
(Big in China is also my top pick for trailing husbands, seconded by Elliott Asbury.*)
Deck Your Shelves
I highly recommend adding any of these books to your wish lists this season. They also make great stocking-stuffers, either for other trailing spouses you’ve met or folks back home who could use a better grasp of the grit and creativity that goes into our crazy / amazing / frustrating / fascinating journeys. Thanks to Amazon, even long-distance gift-giving is an easy click away. (Love it or hate it, big tech — Amazon, Facebook, Uber, etc. — has been an incredible game-changer for trailing spouses.)
Bonus: Each of these books provides interesting conversation material for holiday parties and family gatherings.
Want to share your thoughts on any of these memoirs? Got additional recommendations for our book club, including picks by military partners? Let us know in the Comment section, and we’ll add it to our Pinterest board, too.
