Breakfast Wine

Dress-obsessed and directionless, 44-year-old Alex Poppe can’t get her life together. A business analyst, turned actor, turned teacher, she works a dead-end marketing job under a mammary gland-fixated man and still waits tables to make ends meet. A chance encounter with an acclaimed journalist encourages her to accept a teaching position in northern Iraq, which charms with a heart and a fist. Dining with a pistol-packing hitman, being thrown off the back of a truck during a humanitarian aid drop, and unknowingly working alongside one of Sweden’s most notorious sex offenders are colored-glass pieces of information that fall together in a turn, educating Alex in Kurdish culture and politics beyond what her students teach her in the classroom and what she experiences as a Western woman living in the Middle East. There are earthquakes and building fires and a small war juxtaposed against the senseless, drug-fueled death of a good friend and the bone chilling aftermath of the security police’s investigation. Alex navigates teaching online during the COVID lockdown with the help of WhatsApp before her father’s unexpected passing pushes her to return to the US. Blending memoir, personal essay, local topography, and culture, Breakfast Wine is a frank, human story of pursuing an unconventional life and finding a way home.