POSTED: 25 JULY 2010

Jennifer Steil, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

HarperCollins | 336pp paperback | $35

If you aren’t a frequent reader of non-fiction — and that would include me — please don’t dismiss Jennifer Steil’s The Woman Who Fell from the Sky without a thought.

As one of the blurbs on the back cover says, the memoir does read like a novel.

The setting is the city of Sana’a in Yemen — a city of “gingerbread” houses, with hundreds of mosques, captivating markets, and an Old City that was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984.

It’s a city where an American woman is welcomed by her neighbours and treated with respect by her colleagues, but also a city where local women are hardly ever seen on the streets, especially not alone or without their faces covered with black cloth face and full body cover. A city where a taxi driver might masturbate to sexually harass a female passenger travelling without a male escort, and where the occasional bomb goes off.

Truly a city of precarious mystique — alluring and awful at the same time — at least in the mind of this western woman.

Steil is in Yemen to deliver a short training course to workers on a local newspaper. She makes strong friendships and achieves some significant progress in journalistic skills, so when the offer comes to extend her stay and become the paper’s editor, she jumps at the chance to ditch what has become a mundane life in New York (I know... an oxymoron... I know).

Her story gives an outsider-with-insider-privileges view of life in Yemen, especially the life of women in that country. It perfectly illustrates what we know but often forget — that life is a complex and many faceted affair.