What Once Seemed Strange: A Memoir of Egyptian Exile from Cairo to Austin

Michele Kay, a life that was both too much and too short, left behind this story, one of an unforgettable person and an extraordinary time. --Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort From Cairo to Austin: exiled at 12, Michele Kay takes her readers on a gut-wrenching, painfully lonely, but often exhilarating journey to "home.'' This memoir she tells the intensively personal stories of her family's expulsion from Egypt during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and devastating effects of this displacement on their lives. No matter where her nomadic life took her-London, Hong Kong, Saigon, San Francisco, Paris, Tel Aviv, Washington, Texas-Michele proved, as she once wrote: "life is a series of opportunities...to grab." Mother of two, grandmother of five, she was often described as a "fireball who thought fast, wrote fast and spoke very fast." Inspiring, fascinating: a reassuring story for anyone faced with unwanted, unexpected twists and turns in life. And that would be, of course, all of us. "...very readable-and gripping...the interspersing of Michele's reflecting on displacement and her moments of introspection..sequencing the events of her life. --Ken Ashworth, University of Texas, professor, author, lecturer "...an unforgettable memoir of a remarkable woman who packed multiple lives into one. " --Carrie Rosenthal, former editor of Reader's Digest Condensed Books