In Plumb’s debut memoir, an American recounts the ups and downs of an introverted life that included international travel.

The author says that he was an introvert before he’d even heard the term. In the 1940s, at the age of 4, he ran away from home because he was “overstimulated” by being around his energetic, talkative mother. He preferred time alone, he says—away from people and their loud voices. When he was still very young, he developed ways to appear extroverted like most of his peers. He would break down many tasks, such as presenting a school project in front of a classroom, into a series of steps. He relied on this “winning recipe” for decades, although it wasn’t always successful. His early romances, for example, failed, as girls were attracted to the extroverted “shell” his recipe created but not the bona fide Plumb. He graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Business School and faced the perils of the Vietnam War in the U.S. Army. With his Harvard MBA, he later found work that took him all over the Western Hemisphere, including Chile, Panama, and Florida. He continued to apply his recipe and eventually spotted its flaw: He focused so strongly on specific tasks that he would neglect external circumstances that affected business clients and people in his personal life. Divorce and unemployment made Plumb want to change his way of approaching things. But if he abandoned his recipe, would he be able to finally embrace the introversion that had long defined him?

In these pages, Plumb delivers an engrossing memoir. He writes openly about his love life, as when he tells of learning Portuguese in order to chat with a girl in high school and of dating another girl whose parents apparently didn’t like him at all. His descriptions are often vibrant, as when he tells of walking the streets in Vietnam: “Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dressed in plastic sandals and lightweight clothes scooted deftly around chug-holes on Japanese motorbikes. Bombed-out bars stood next to new ones thrown up overnight.” Readers with comparable personality traits will find many of the author’s experiences familiar over the course of the book, as when he deems a chaotic, noisy classroom debate “introvert hell.” He often blames his introversion, however, for failed business ventures and job losses he’s suffered when, in some cases, the results might very well have been unavoidable for an extrovert as well. Still, despite his difficulties, he’s led an undeniably remarkable life; for instance, he worked for a company that the FBI investigated for allegations of stock fraud by executives (who were later cleared of wrongdoing) and for another that was under perpetual threat from Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. He also effectively shines a light on his loving parents; his father was Neely Plumb, who produced the soundtrack for The Sound of Music. The author ends with three helpful “tools” that introverts can use to cope in a loud, often crowded world.

An intriguing remembrance that some will find highly relatable.