My Foreign Cities: A Memoir

Praise for My Foreign Cities: A Memoir

This is a book that demands your whole heart: My Foreign Cities is an extraordinary memoir of a young couple's journey together in the face of devastating loss. With humor, grace, and excruciating tenderness, Scarboro dives deep into beauty and pain, joy and grief, and reminds us what a fragile, miraculous, and ferocious thing life is. An unforgettable story told with the force and conviction of love itself.

— Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country

Read the first page of Elizabeth Scarboro's memoir My Foreign Cities, and you're ready for the inevitable tears… More unexpected is this writer's intelligent and gripping honesty… In writing this book [Scarboro] provides certain comfort to others who know what she knows about ‘returning to the strange country I lived in now,’ the one called life.

— Amy Shearn - O Magazine

Elizabeth Scarboro shows us what those fortunate enough to find the deepest love will do for each other. Her memoir is a moving story that will shine its warm light for anyone navigating the rough country of illness with a partner. With some personal observation of the lay of this land, I will shout out—quality medical insurance for all, in our time!
— Julie Metz, New York Times bestselling author of Perfection

At its heart, this beautiful memoir is a love story. And what a love story it is: convincing, clear-eyed, honest, prismatic and saturated with warmth and hard-won wisdom.
— Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks

What strikes you about Elizabeth Scarboro's My Foreign Cities is how well the author sees. Much of the time grappling with the illness of the man she loves is spent in observing him and everything around them both, as if seeing were a way of preserving. Of course, it is. And so, this book, so cleanly written, becomes a quiet lesson in how death may be confronted by an alert and embracing concentration on life.

— Roger Rosenblatt, author of Kayak Morning and Making Toast

In this paradoxically triumphant love story, written with verve, style, and unexpected modesty, Elizabeth Scarboro reveals youth maturing before the reader's eyes. She does this by packing into one decade more experience, drama, change, and devotion than some lovers ever achieve and shows us that it's the quality, not quantity, that counts.
— Alix Kates Shulman, author of To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

In My Foreign Cities, Scarboro invites us to accompany her on every mile of her joyous, often terrifying, sad and exalted journey of love. A natural storyteller, she brings vividly to life her struggles both to protect Stephen, who has a “lightness about him,” and to keep him at her side as long as she can so that they can embrace life to its fullest. She leads us down the path where his medical condition consumes every waking minute of their lives—including a lung transplant, its results and Stephen’s eventual decline—and shares her agony, her joy, her anger and her indecision with us.

— Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. - BookPage

Conceived from a New York Times “Modern Love” column, this entrancing story of a woman’s marriage to Stephen, a man living with cystic fibrosis (CF), should not be written off as merely a memoir of disease. When Scarboro met her future husband at 17, she struggled to make a life for herself while faced with the challenge of loving someone with a constantly looming expiration date. While Scarboro, her husband, and CF are the three main characters, the story truly shines as the two try to navigate their twenties bouncing between the Bay Area, Boulder, and Boston during the 1990s. ...This book squeezes a soul-encompassing marriage into the events of just one decade, and Scarboro manages to tell—with strength and grace—her all-too-short love story....

— Library Journal

In Scarboro’s clear-eyed, plain-spoken prose, readers will feel her sense of panic and share in her bewilderment as she paces hospital waiting rooms, doles out pills from a locked tackle box and makes end-of-life decisions before Stephen’s lung transplant. Yet for all its raw immediacy, this memoir is also tempered with the hard-won perspective that comes with time…. My Foreign Cities is not a self-help book in the classic sense but it will help you in the way that any good book does—by seizing your imagination, searing its story in your memory and laying bare a journey of inspiration, quiet heroism and heart.

— Kirk Reed Forrester - Kirkus Reviews

Uplifting. This is not just a story about the challenges of loving someone with a terminal illness; it's about recognizing those precious moments in life that Virginia Woolf once called ‘moments of being.’ It's about savoring the present, not allowing sadness to dominate and surrendering yourself to love, for better or worse…. My Foreign Cities is a story of extremes, and although its particulars may not be familiar to many readers, its lessons on savoring our days and wasting no time are truly universal.

— Carmela Ciuraru - San Francisco Chronicle

Her thoughtful memoir takes readers on the beautiful and painful journey of loving someone with a life-threatening illness…. Teen readers will enjoy the romance—unsentimentally portrayed—of marrying a childhood sweetheart and the grit of sticking with him through breathing tubes and ventilators.
— School Library Journal