My Book Made It Into a Brazilian Newspaper (And I May Never Recover)

Apr 3

I was minding my own business (probably stress-eating crackers while my toddler redecorated the dog with her plastic camera) when a WhatsApp message stopped me cold.

My book. In a Brazilian newspaper. Written about by an actual journalist.

Parenting Unpacked landed in the pages of Diário de Taubaté, thanks to the brilliant Danielle Baleiro Amorim and her column Entrelinhas. And she didn't just mention it — she got it.

Screenshot of a Diário de Taubaté article featuring Parenting Unpacked by Jessica Gabrielzyk, exploring parenting abroad and identity shifts — Screenshot of the *Parenting Unpacked* feature in *Diário de Taubaté*.

Danielle wrote about the thing at the heart of the book: how parenthood quietly dismantles your identity while you're busy trying to keep everyone alive. That creeping feeling of sitting in a school meeting, nodding confidently, while internally having a full existential crisis. The person you used to be? Gone. Didn't even leave a note.

She also highlighted something close to my heart: how uniquely disorienting this is for families raising children outside their home country. New language, new systems, new rules, same chaos.

Seeing it described so beautifully in print — in Brazil, no less — made me realise those late-night, cold-coffee, cracker-fuelled writing sessions were absolutely worth it.

Danielle, thank you. You made a very tired author very happy.

And if you speak Portuguese — or just want to see your name in a Brazilian newspaper and feel fancy — you can read Danielle's full column right here in the Diário de Taubaté.

Even if you don't understand a word, the vibe is very "yes, this book is a big deal, obviously."

Parenting Unpacked will be available on Amazon really, really 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.

My Book Made It Into a Brazilian Newspaper (And I May Never Recover)

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