What Once Seemed Strange

by Michele Kay, Mary Ann Roser

Overview

From Cairo to Austin: exiled at 12, Michele Kay takes her readers on a gut-wrenching, painfully lonely, but often exhilarating journey to “home.’’
Through 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940150150614
Publisher:	Hugo House Publishers, Ltd.
Publication date:	01/17/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	174
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Michele Kay was born in Cairo Egypt in 1944 of a British father and a French mother. Her family was expelled from Egypt during the 1956 Suez Canal and eventually made Hong Kong and London their new residences. Michele was fluent in French and English.
She moved to the United States permanently in 1981 and became a naturalized
U.S. citizen in 1997. She earned a Bachelor in Liberal Studies in 2002 and a Master’s of Arts in 2005 from St. Edward’s University, in Austin, Texas.


Michele was a journalist for four decades, covering politics and business for newspapers and magazines in Asia, Europe and the United States. She served as a reporter, an editor, a columnist and an editorial writer. She retired from the Austin American-Statesman in July 2003, and then spent three years teaching journalism at St. Edward’s University. She died of an aggressive brain tumor in February 2011.
Mary Ann Roser is a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, and has been a resident of Austin since 1993. She has been a journalist for 30 years and joined the Austin American-Statesman in December 1995, when she met Michele Kay. Before that, she worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Austin bureau, the Knight- Ridder Washington bureau and various newspapers in Kentucky, including the Lexington Herald-Leader and Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer.
Roser has won many state and national awards, including two Knight Science Fellowships to MIT, a three-month-long fellowship to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a fellowship to the National Library of Medicine.
She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband Ted.