Publisher: Storyworth
Pages: 325 pages
Images: 150 photographs
Price: Free
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A Life of Journeys

Pamela Portwood's memoir, A Life of Journeys, opens with the story of her childhood spent "in the middle of nowhere Venezuela," and her expat heritage of never belonging anywhere becomes a backdrop to this collection of essays. She always is ready to travel somewhere that isn't supposed to feel like home: to get married in Mexico, to make temple offerings in Thailand, to wear a veil at a Sufi gathering in Iran. A seizure at the end of one of her trips leads to a three-year struggle with medications to control her epilepsy. Some of her journeys are spent, not on the road, but at home as she works her way through the writer's life with its successes and setbacks. Beneath the joys and the blues, the question of why she should believe in anything greater than the world before her eyes persists. Several essays, like Portwood's life, are grounded in her family's lives from the stories of her mother who lived in post-WWII Berlin to those of her father who fulfilled the American Dream. Ultimately, A Life of Journeys wends its way through poetry, belief, loss and love.