I love a good travel adventure story (true or imagined) about experiencing a new culture. When it also includes personal growth, as Deborah Rodriguez’s new memoir does, that makes it even better.
I enjoyed her first memoir Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil and her subsequent novel (still inspired by her true experiences) The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, so giving this book a try was a no-brainer. I actually thought the book got off to a slow start, and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to finish it. She wrote a lot about the difficult and dangerous personal situations that caused her to leave her friends and family in Kabul, but it seemed sort of disjointed and narrative, which made it slow and hard to get into.
However, once she jumped to the purpose of the story, her move to Mexico, she launched into the creative, emotionally honest and descriptive writing that I enjoy and expected. It made me want to move to Mexico!
All of the plot points that one expects in this sort of travel/relocation memoir are present: difficulties in communicating and connecting, differences between our way of life and theirs, appreciation of local flavor and more.
Not only did moving to Mexico help her start her life again, she also looked at some bad habits that have caused problems in life, in regards to her romantic entanglements, parenting her adult sons, and her fight or flight response caused by PTSD-like symptoms due to her time in Kabul.
I’m glad that I kept going past the first 30 or 40 pages and got into the meat of Margarita Wednesdays: Making a New Life by the Mexican Sea. It will stick with me for a long time.