Yesterday I finished reading my friend Pamela Petro’s new memoir The Long Field (now available from the U.K.). Pamela was one of the first writers to contact me - a letter written on a typewriter that began "Dear Mr. Swick" - after I became the travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel. Over the next 19 years I published everything she sent me: a story about dogsledding, one about staying in a lighthouse, one about running out of money in Portugal (and how at that moment the trip took on meaning), one about remarkable religious statuary in Brazil. They were all wonderful - marked by Pamela's incisive eye, restless intellect, and unquenchable fascination with the world - but the one that stood out for me was the one she wrote about a summer in Wales spent studying Welsh. She had developed a strong bond to the country that came through clearly in every sentence.
Her brilliant new memoir is about this bond and so much more. Centering on the Welsh word hiraeth - a kind of yearning that transcends homesickness, and is not confined to place - Pamela explores the ideas of home, loss, love, family, and sexuality. I came away from it not just in awe of her ability to seamlessly weave all these themes into a rich and moving narrative, but with something much deeper: a new view of the world and my place in it.
