2012 Book Review #78: Diplomatic Baggage

[jethrien]

Title: Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse
Author: Brigid Keenan
Genre: Memoir
Thingummies: 2.5

Synopsis: The memoirs of an EU diplomat's wife.

Thoughts: I'm really not sure how much of this book can be explained by the British national tendency to self-deprecate, and how much is that this woman really is a useless ditz.

I'm inclined to think it's mostly the former. If one were to go entirely by this memoir taken at face value, this reporter-turned-diplomat's-spouse has spent pretty much her entire life collapsing into tears, shrewishly nagging her husband, ruining dinner parties, and scandalizing the natives of whatever posting she's sent to. Since this isn't Bridget Jones' Diary and she has neither been divorced by her husband nor gotten him fired, I'm going to assume that she's generally a fairly competent person and this endless parade of meltdowns is exaggerated for comic effect.

It's still annoying, though, which is a pity, because she's led a fascinating life. They were in Barbados for the invasion of Grenada, and Ethiopia for the famine. They've lived in Syria and Trinidad and Gambia and Kazakhstan. We don't hear much about the tireless folks working on aid projects and diplomatic postings in the middle of nowhere, and most of us don't have to deal with hippos blocking the mailbox or have opportunities to restore adorable little houses in the Old City of Damascus. She has a lot of fascinating adventures, and if they're somewhat buried in her tales of managing an eccentric assortment of cooks and butlers, well, that's fairly foreign as a concept to me, too. There's a lot of interesting details to take in here. But I spent far too much of the book wanting to shake her, saying "Stop crying and nagging, you ninny--you signed on for this. If you hate this so much, you can go home!"

Comments

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

She is probably self-deprecating, but if the British foreign service is anything like the rest of their civil service (or ours), you can do a truly appalling number of things without getting fired. It does seem unlikely that they would keep sending somebody appalling out abroad, though. We usually find nice administrative posts (occasionally in "training" positions) at home to get such people out of the way.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

While they're British, he works for the EU. She doesn't--she's just the spouse. I wouldn't ordinarily say "just" the spouse--I get the impression that being an ambassador's wife is a job unto itself--but this particular lady seems to be so self-centered and so useless that I find it difficult to believe that she was much of an asset to his career.