The Portrait of A Lady: A Memoir

Ann is restless and dissatisfied with the avenues open to her in New York and yearns to see if life is more promising elsewhere. She leaves New York in 1964 with $400 and a one-way ticket to Lisbon and for the next ten years lives and works in Spain, Italy, Israel, and Greece. She learns new languages at the dinner table and in the market, shares unfamiliar religious rituals and dabbles in unfamiliar beliefs, is awed by cathedrals and sites far more ancient than America’s, is perplexed by the tangle of strange political mazes, learns to love arid, warm places, embraces siestas and local foods, finds her place in Italian, Greek, and Israeli families, and falls in love more than once.
In the beginning, she embraces the unfamiliar ways—how else could she gauge their usefulness? She makes mistakes, misunderstands the import of words and behavior, and loses her inner compass from time to time, but becomes tougher and more discriminating.
America thrives on mutual trust, Europe and Israel do not, and her naiveté makes her vulnerable in ways she does not foresee. In the end, she is an outsider with little influence either personally or politically and must chart her own course.
The book is an homage to the eponymous book by Henry James, whose heroine, Isabel Archer, shares a similar arc of experience with Ann. The fictional Isabel and the real Ann both leave America hoping for greener pastures. They emerge from their odysseys more resourceful and resilient.