TRANQUILA

A doctor relocates her unprepared family to Spain in Breen’s debut travel memoir.

In 2013, the author and her husband, Tim, moved their three kids from Silicon Valley to Barcelona. Breen, a doctor, felt like she was missing her kids’ childhoods as she worked evening shifts at the emergency room; when the couple heard how much their neighbors were earning from renting out their house on Craigslist, they quickly followed suit. Picking Barcelona as a destination, based on little more than a cursory internet search and Tim’s high school and college Spanish, the family flew off for a planned yearlong stay with visions of tapas, cava, and the tranquilo lifestyle dancing in their heads. The reality was not quite so rosy—first came the realization that, in Barcelona, people speak mostly Catalan, an entirely different language from Spanish. Second, getting the kids (aged 9, 7, and 5) to their international school every morning would require an uphill hike, a train, and a bus ride. Breen soon began to wonder if her attempt to spend more time with her kids while broadening their horizons in one of the world’s great cities might merely have guaranteed them (and her) a year of stress and alienation. To rise to the occasion, she was forced to adapt in ways she never would have thought possible. Breen writes with self-deprecating humor, as when she describes balancing the need to practice Spanish with the urge to make friends: “My Spanish at this point was restricted to the present tense, and to the subjects of food or modes of transportation. So with my desire to deepen our friendship with Claudia and Tomás, I pushed the English.” Perhaps the author is playing up the Breens’ naïveté—the degree of the family’s ineptitude in unfamiliar surroundings is sometimes difficult to comprehend. Even so, the reader’s early feelings of schadenfreude for this woefully unprepared clan soon morph into a more complex appreciation for how shifting every aspect of life—language, food, housing, transportation—lays bare the fundamental structures of motherhood.

A colorful, mortifying memoir of relearning to parent in a foreign country.