Kirkus Reviews QR Code
THE CARRY-ON IMPERATIVE by Robin Pascoe

THE CARRY-ON IMPERATIVE

A Memoir of Travel, Reinvention & Giving Back

by Robin Pascoe

Pub Date: Sept. 5th, 2023
ISBN: 978-1738904006
Publisher: Botania Books

A Canadian journalist and authority on expatriation presents a memoir to inspire readers to “carry on,” whatever the challenge.

In 1975, when a young Pascoe told her father that she was going to journalism school, he toasted her for seeking a “second career” to supplement her more important job as a wife and mother. This irritated but challenged the author, and Pascoe’s account of her dogged determination to succeed as a reporter and author is just one of the many subtle, good-natured rebellions against conventional expectations that mark this gem of a book. Pascoe spent much of her life traveling the world with her Canadian diplomat husband, Rodney Briggs, and their children. Aspiring to the “spunk” of her idol, Mary Tyler Moore, she turned the oft-bewildering experience of expatriation into the source of her success as a writer. She authored several books aimed at expatriate families adjusting to life abroad and back home, and she became a sought-after speaker and writer. Each chapter in this book is quite brief, but Pascoe’s skill at creating vivid scenes of expat life is superb, and readers will find her self-deprecating humor endearing. Admitting her lack of fashion sense, for example, she notes that the wives of other diplomats would always appear at gala events looking “divine while I resembled a reupholstered sofa.” But there’s a serious side to Pascoe’s story, including her struggles against entrenched sexism in journalistic and diplomatic circles in the final decades of the 20th century, and the impact of personal loss on the formation of her character: As a young teenager, Pascoe lost her mother to a brain aneurysm, and she helps readers to see how this led her to forge her own notions of womanhood and motherhood.

A witty, honest, and inspiring remembrance.