There Is a Book in My Head That I Am Not Ready to Write Yet.

May 4

I have written two books back to back. Launched both of them under circumstances I did not plan for. Sinusitis for three months during the first one which was Maternity Abroad. My daughter in the hospital during the second, which was My First American Coloring Book. A third book launching on June 24th that is still in the final stages, which is the book Parenting Unpacked. I am, to put it plainly, tired.

And somewhere inside all of that tiredness there is an idea that will not leave me alone.

It is about Brazil. Not Brazil as a place. Brazil as something else entirely. A way of being in the world that I have been carrying my whole life without having the right words for it until recently. A philosophy, maybe. A framework. Something that has a name in Portuguese that does not translate cleanly into anything else.

I am not ready to write it yet. I know that. I need to let Parenting Unpacked breathe first. I need to sleep. I need to stop checking IngramSpark at midnight. I need to be a person for a few weeks before I become a writer again.

But the idea is there. Sitting in my head with the particular patience of something that knows it is going to get written eventually and is fine waiting.

I am telling you it exists because I think that is how books begin, at least for me. Not with a plan but with a public admission. Once I say it out loud it becomes real in a way it was not before. And once it is real I am accountable to it.

So. There is a book. It is Brazilian. It is about a way of living that the modern world has mostly forgotten how to do. I do not have a title yet. I have something better than a title. I have the feeling of it.

That is enough to start with.

If you have thoughts about what Brazilian culture means to you — not the stereotype, not the carnival, but the actual thing underneath all of that — I would genuinely love to hear them. This book is going to need more than one brain to exist.

Tired but not done,

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ WHAT COMES NEXT · NOT YET · BUT SOON ✦

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.

There Is a Book in My Head That I Am Not Ready to Write Yet.

Who Am I After Moving Abroad?

A One Woman Business.