“I don’t hate men,” says Lisa Kirchner in the New School classroom where she was a student seven years ago. Her memoir Hello American Lady Creature is about how her marriage ended while she was in Qatar, one of the world’s most patriarchal societies, but she harbors no resentment toward the opposite sex. This yoga teacher beams about the value of men interacting with children. “I asked my friend, ‘Are you really going to let him pick up your baby?’, and she shrugged like it was no big deal. One of the biggest flaws I see in our society is how we are afraid of letting men play with kids.”
Hello American Lady Creature: What I Learned as a Woman in Qatar is a memoir full of insights like these. Kirchner’s trenchant observations and reflections on relationships and culture show how living abroad can clarify what we want from ourselves, and how we choose to get it.
Ms. Kirchner is a 47 year-old who has had plenty of experience traveling. Born in Quincey, Massachusetts, she moved ten times before she was 12, and wound up graduating from Ohio State University before moving to Pittsburgh where she worked in marketing and journalism. At 24, she had a short stint in the Peace Corps in Tunisia before they canceled the program due to safety conditions.
Her move to Qatar was supposed to align her with husband’s desire to pursue international journalism. But her marriage dissolved when her then-husband moved back to Buffalo, leaving her alone in the desert heat. Ms. Kirchner lived in the tiny Persian Gulf country for three years, working at the Carnegie Mellon University satellite campus with local students and learning about the world’s richest per capita country. The silent strength of Qatari women inspired her, so that after her contract with CMU elapsed, she decided to do something she’d never had the courage to do before—move to New York City.
After one year of writing Hello American Lady Creature and another spent revising, the independent Greenpoint Press is set to release her work on May 31st. Ms. Kirchner used Kickstarter to raise funding for a seasoned publicist to schedule readings around the Northeast. She’s also offering a class called “The Secrets of Essay Writing” at New York Public Library on August 16th at 3 p.m.
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