My Book Designer Came Up With an Idea So Good I Thought She Was Flirting With Me.

Parenting abroad book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

There is a detail in Parenting Unpacked that I love and cannot take any credit for.

Throughout the book there are marks from a coffee mug on the page. Every single one of them placed deliberately. A visual cue that says: put the coffee down. Take a moment. Sit with this.

That idea came from Raquel Serafim, my book designer.

When she told me about it I had a very strong impulse to make a joke. I stayed professional because I am a serious author and a serious person and I kept it together completely.

But I can’t help myself. 🤣 I am telling you the joke now.

My immediate thought was: is she flirting with me? Because thoughtfulness at that level is my love language. If my husband came to me with an idea that considered, that specific, that perfectly calibrated to what the book is actually about, I would look him in the eye and think: he wants another kid. Or a dog. Possibly both.

If you want to seduce a marketing person by degree and an author by heart, now you know where to start.

Raquel. Thank you for the coffee rings. Thank you for reading the book closely enough to know what it needed. And thank you for being so good at your job that my first instinct was to wonder if you had an ulterior motive.

This idea slays and I said what I said.

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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