American Lady Creature: My Change in the Middle East. A Qatar Memoir. (ePub)

The memoir of an American woman stuck in the Middle East as her life unravels, and then comes back together. Listed as one of Goodreads best books for a book club, Kirchner delivers an unflinching look at turn-of-the-century expatriate life in Qatar. New edition.

"Like Eat Pray Love, but funny,"
—NPR

American Lady Creature tells how one woman survived menopause, a suicide bombing, and divorce, all while living in one of the world's most patriarchal cultures. When LL Kirchner moved to Qatar for her husband and to improve the state of education for Muslim women, she was looking forward to how it would also change her life. But her health took a nosedive, she lost her dogs, and her marriage ended, leaving Kirchner to redefine her identity as a woman — from within a country where dating was illegal. For fans of Cheryl Strayed's Wild.

"I hoped moving to Qatar would change everything," she writes. "Until it did."

An unforgettable escapade about facing some of life's most serious issues — fertility, aging, and love — American Lady Creature is a story of loss transformed, by the landscape, people, and hope she found as a woman living in Qatar. After a lifetime of seeing herself as fiercely independent, she was not expecting to heal thanks to the communities she found. Especially not from yoga, something she'd previously viewed as stretching between real sports.

From the award-winning screenwriter LL Kirchner comes this searingly raw, humorous memoir of discovering what it meant to divorce while female in the Persian Gulf—the soul-searching questions, the loss, and the bizarre experience of seeing women wrapped in black float past Victoria's Secret ads.