Nell, unrestrained, besotted with exclamation points - ''Boy! was it beaut! We talked ALL night (sorry, a bit of exajuration (or however you spell it) )'' The story of her first pen pal, the daughter of a Sydney newspaper columnist who refers to his daughterĪs ''Little Nell'' in print, is delicious.

It is no wonder that such a child would look outward and project her own fantasies of a passionate and engaged life onto her young correspondents. Another joins in the laughter when a young Geraldine insists that she intends to become a biochemist and discover a cure for cancer. Sister a mediocre grade in art so she won't be tempted to join the shady types in art school. Australians, Brooks says, wereĪlso vulnerable in that era to ''Cultural Cringe - the Australian belief that just about anybody anywhere did things better than we did.'' Her evocation of her Roman Catholic schooling is chilling. She is funny on the subject ofĪustralian ''mates,'' who have traditionally relied on one another for emotional support, and on the bloke jokes (about male sexual incompetence) that women have invented in retaliation. What comes in between is how Brooks deals with the isolation and smallness she feels in 1960's Australia, a conservative country embroiled in the Vietnam War, struggling inanely with a whites-only immigration policy. The portraits of both parents are clear-eyed and loving they are the bookends of this story. Her mother's way with words is crucial, too, for as a little girl Geraldine suffers from serious and mysterious fevers, her convalescences marked by the sound of her mother's stories Proofreader, a lover of precision in language. never thought of making an international telephone call.'' Her father, an American singer stranded in Australia when his bandleader absconded with his return fare, fell in love with the country and eventually became a newspaper Brooks's family has ''no car, had never set foot on an airplane and ''Foreign Correspondence'' opens in the lower-middle-class Sydney neighborhood of Bland Street (what great luck for a writer describing bland times). charming and sharply intelligent, with much to say about growing up female and geographically unconnected - should not fall victim to summary or to memoirophobia. Pen pals? A reader might be forgiven for suspecting that memoir mania has really gone too far. N summary, this memoir might sound less than scintillating: Geraldine Brooks, a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, grew up in Australia longingįor news of the outside world, acquired pen pals from abroad, and years later sought them out. As a girl, Geraldine Brooks acquired lots of pen pals.

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