Hers is the most authentic voice I ve heard from the expat fifties. She brings to life a seminal decade in literary and sexual history, one that she and her fellow expats, coming home, passed on to the next generation of Americans who thought that they had invented the Sexual Revolution. This is an essential book. And a damn good story as well!
Edward Field, author of The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era
A well-observed account of the texture of life for those resistant spirits who actively held out against the cultural norms of 1950 s America. To read Abroad is to take a wander down the pleasure path of a sadly bygone era.
Moe Angeles, Performer/Playwright, Creator of the theater piece Sontag: Reborn
Abroad is a beautifully felt and rendered story of a fascinating woman in a fascinating time. Harriet Zwerling s account of her life in Paris in the fifties is entertaining and important. Don t miss this wonderful book.
Mary Dearborn, author of Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim
Abroad, and how! We see in this diary a beautiful, brave young woman escape Cold War America s stifling paranoias to conduct her own intimate search for the truth of desire. Bravely, she questions pleasure itself: Where is it most to be found? In encounters with men or with women? What are its costs? How does it challenge emotional, mental, and physical well-being? A reader marvels at the vitality with which Harriet Sohmers Zwerling meets those challenges, the honesty with which she records her experience, and the generosity with which she offers the record to us today.
Sarah White, author of Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson and Alice Ages and Ages