In The Woman Who Fell from the Sky author Jennifer Steil recounts a year spent in Yemen, where she worked to modernize a newspaper and help its journalists adopt Western methods of journalism. Along her one-year journey she changes the lives of and is changed by the women in her office and their culture, she pushes the boundaries of comfort of the men in her office, and she learns to live the life of an expat.

Memoirs require the ability to tell stories with depth and essayistic contemplation, use a blend of the universal and individual. They are not merely chronicles of quotidian matters, as this one was, leaving itself to read more like autobiography.

Jennifer Steil’s web site

Content

As a former expat and one who’s worn hijab, I could relate to Steil’s early concerns for the practice. As one who has worked in multiple other cultures, I could relate to her frustrations with the workplace’s pace and practices. However, she might have been hired to improve the Yemen Observer but her tale read more like a forced issue than one that changed her. For instance, the more I fought China and its workplace practices the further and further I dug myself into a hole. With more travel came more recognition to work within the parameters of the culture, not against it, as Steil’s book repeatedly made me think of.

Having been warned by an American friend, “You cannot show them any weakness. You cannot show them a flaw or they will become completely disillusioned and lose faith in you,” as she was in the book’s beginning, I saw more forcing and demanding than observing and navigating of the workplace. Her decision to often work for almost 24 hours straight did not impress me or make the narrator more likable; it worked in contrast to that, actually.

The book focused too much on the job. The character was too driven by her American professional identity, which remained static throughout the story. Her choice to scream at her colleagues and fail to see that they’re not rushed, not wired for perfectionism, not bound by the American shackles of productivity made me pity her. Yet I don’t think that’s the intent of the book.

Romance

The entire topic of romance annoyed me from the start. This was especially so because each broach of the subject lacked sufficient weight or depth to suggest any careful consideration and therefore didn’t work enough o put me on her side. For instance, upon meeting people she always tells them she’s married and even wears a wedding ring. Why? What did she have to gain (or lose) by doing so? Even when she reminds us that she’s spending one of her last fertile years in a country where she’s unlikely to find a romantic partner, the contemplation takes all of a short paragraph. That’s not a lot of front weight to justify putting so much back weight on finding the man who’s now her husband. To top it off, she barely seemed to feel more than momentary obligatory remorse for having stolen another woman’s husband. I’d have felt more for a minor character in a Harlequin Romance novel.

Overall Steil does not have much literary control over her writing. She had so much potential to move us by creating a mini story around various experiences there, but time and again left me hanging. With its lack of depth and literary tropes, the autobiography disguised as a memoir called The Woman Who Fell from the Sky might appeal to the masses. It does not appeal to this literary snob.

The book wasn’t entirely without merit, however. It contained one of the best quotes on travel I’ve ever read: “Travel is always like this, I remind myself. Uneven, with stretches of loneliness and anxiety followed by unparalleled moments of bliss and discovery. In the droughts, I have to learn to trust that the joy will come.”