Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid places where history happens and culture comes from. She enlists pen pals who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of their letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz. Twenty years later - and worlds away from her sheltered girlhood - Brooks is an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, reporting on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa. But she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence. Traveling full circle to attend her dying father, Brooks stumbles on the old letters in her parents' basement. She embarks on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends, and to retrieve her own lost memories of the shy Sydney girl who wrote to them. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness. It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeplace clearly. This intimate, moving, and often humorous memoir of growing up Down Under speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.

杰拉尔丁-布鲁克斯出生在澳大利亚悉尼一个工人阶级社区的布兰德街，她渴望发现历史发生和文化产生的生动场所。她找来了笔友，这些笔友为她提供了一个了解中东、欧洲和美国的青春期危险的窗口。在他们信件的帮助下，布鲁克斯把她的卧室变成了星际企业号的舰桥，巴黎学生抗议活动的路障，陷入困境的基布兹的沼泽地。20年后--与她受庇护的少女时代相去甚远--布鲁克斯是《华尔街日报》的一名获奖外国记者，报道中东、波斯尼亚和非洲的战争和饥荒。但她从未忘记她早先的外国通信。为了看望她临终的父亲，布鲁克斯在她父母的地下室里偶然发现了这些旧信。她开始了一场人类寻宝之旅，寻找她的笔友，并找回她自己失去的关于那个给他们写信的害羞的悉尼女孩的记忆。她一个接一个地找到了那些被战争和仇恨、名声和恶名，以及被一种神秘而悲惨的精神疾病摧残过的男人和女人。只有在异国他乡，在陌生生活的背景下，布鲁克斯才最终清楚地看到了她的家乡。这本亲密、感人、常常是幽默的回忆录，讲述了每个曾经渴望成为世界女性的女孩的不平静的心。