Twenty years later -- and worlds away from her sheltered girlhood -- Brooks became an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, reporting on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa. But she never forgot her earlier foreign correspondence. Traveling full-circle to attend to her dying father, Brooks stumbles on the old letters in her parents' basement. She embarks on a human treasure hunt to find her pen-friends and to retrieve her own lost memories of the shy Sydney girl who wrote to them. Her search leads through Israeli moshavim, Arab souks, medieval French hill towns, Martha's Vineyard fishing shacks, and Manhattan nightclubs. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness.

It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeplace clearly. This intimate, moving, and often humorous memoir of growing up Down Under speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.