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MWSA Review
Dispatches from the Cowgirl: Through the Looking Glass with a Navy Diplomat’s Wife by Julie Tully is an engaging read from beginning to end. In letters written to family and friends, Tully showed them, in vivid detail, places they would most likely never see. Entries from her diary and those letters she wrote grew into this memoir.
Julie Tully was born into a cattle ranching family in northern California. For more than a third of her life she worked the cattle or marketed the beef. Tully explains, “I am a girl of the land who married a man of the sea.” From her perspective, she writes of extraordinary events and everyday life during her time as a military spouse in Africa.
To Julie, the diplomatic post is more than a job. She and husband John actively immerse themselves in the customs of the country. In short, they bloom where they are planted. Following the example his parents set for him, their young son Quinn spends his early school years learning to speak French and making friends with other expat children and locals who staff the embassy in which they live. A supposed two-year assignment for her family in Sub-Saharan Africa soon turns into an eight-year adventure in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Djibouti. In a world where diplomacy is key, Julie Tully, in her cowboy boots, charms the embassy staff and foreign diplomats in every assignment with her genuine demeanor.
Looking back over the words she wrote, Julie Tully sees a big picture of how she found purpose as the spouse of a diplomat in Africa after leaving her career to become a full-time mom and a traveling Navy spouse. She quotes Lewis Carroll, who writes in Alice in Wonderland: “Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventure.”
Review by Nancy Panko (February 2023)
Author's Synopsis
Would you move to Africa? For Julie Tully, a cowgirl who married a United States naval officer, the answer was a no-brainer: Yes!
Leaving her career and everything she knew behind to follow her husband, Julie was rapidly approaching forty and wondering, “What is my place in the world?” Enter Africa, the continent she had dreamed of since childhood, a chance to reinvigorate her life. A supposed two-year assignment for her family in Sub-Saharan Africa soon turns into an eight-year adventure in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Djibouti and sees Julie become an unofficial diplomat as wife to a military attaché. In a world where diplomacy is key, Julie becomes the person she was meant to be.
Julie’s memoir is a real-life Alice in Wonderland tale. A cowgirl falls into Africa like Alice fell into Wonderland, taking you on a voyage of discovery and into the little-known world of an American military spouse serving amongst the world’s diplomatic corps. One moment, you’ll laugh out loud as Julie takes her first step onto the African continent and begins setting up their home in Cameroon. The next, you’ll gasp in shock as a terrorist bomb shakes their house in Nigeria.
Part travelogue, and part midlife coming-of-age story, Dispatches from the Cowgirl takes you to the Africa that Julie experienced. Complete with all its beauty and flaws, it’s the Africa that continues to capture the attention of the world’s military powers and the Africa she struggled to say goodbye to.
Format(s) for review: Paper and Kindle
Review Genre: Nonfiction—Memoir/Biography
Number of Pages: 335
Word Count: 86,610