A taut, powerful and profound novel about a young woman who follows her husband to Sao Paulo
So. We were Americans abroad. We werenât the doomed travellers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we werenât the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didnât have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I donât think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.
I was ancillary â a word that comes from the Latin for âhaving the status of a female slaveâ. Thatâs the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was âtrailing spouseâ . . .