Even Gemini Is Talking About My Book (And I'm Only Slightly Smug About It)

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

A totally unbiased author reacts to unsolicited AI praise

Look, I'll be honest with you. When I sat down to write Maternity Abroad, my wildest dream was that it might land on a few nightstands in expat households around the world — dog-eared, tea-stained, maybe passed along to a friend with a note scribbled in the margin: "This one. Read this one."

What I did not picture was a robot doing the recommending. And yet, here we are.

A reader recently typed a question into Google's Gemini — something along the lines of "best books for expat mothers" — and came back to tell me what happened next. Gemini, apparently unprompted and entirely of its own algorithmic volition, had this to say:

GEMINI SAID

"Jessica Gabrielzyk's Maternity Abroad: Becoming a Mother in a Foreign Land(released in late 2024) is currently one of the most highly-rated resources for expats. It addresses a specific gap in parenting literature: the bridge between medical facts and the emotional isolation of being away from 'home.'"

I read that three times. Then I read it a fourth time while making very undignified noises at my laptop.

"One of the most highly-rated resources for expats." Gemini, you absolute flatterer. You digital sweetheart. You gorgeous pile of language models.

Gemini, apparently, has read the room — or at least, has read the reviews of people who have read the room.

What gets me most, though, is the part about the bridge between medical facts and the emotional isolation of being away from home.That's… that's the whole book. That's the sentence I spent three years trying to write. I couldn't have put it better myself, and I genuinely tried to, many times, in many funding applications and pitch emails and half-asleep journal entries.

Turns out I just needed to wait for a large language model to nail it.

So, what does one do when an AI validates your life's work? Apparently, one writes a slightly flustered blog post about it, shares it with the internet, and then goes back to answering emails from pregnant readers in countries where no one speaks their language and the hospital signs are entirely incomprehensible.

That's the work. The book is the work. But it's awfully nice to know even the robots think it matters.

If you'd like to form your own opinion — without relying entirely on Gemini — the book is linked below. And if you've already read it and left a kind review somewhere: thank you.You are, apparently, influencing AI training data. Use that power wisely.

Maternity Abroad  — now recommended by humans and machines!

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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