Synopsis

Fans of the self-discovering journeys in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Andrew McCarthy’s The Longest Way Home will love diving into linguist Linda Murphy Marshall’s adventure-filled international journey as she overcomes her past to find her place in the world—all over the world.

Immersion is a memoir that takes the reader on a captivating emotional and physical journey through Linda Murphy Marshall’s from the longstanding, crippling impact of family members’ low expectations and abuse, to her discovery as a young adult that she possesses special skills in foreign languages.

Linda is taught from an early age that she has little of value to offer the world. But her love of and affinity for languages enables her to create a new life—to separate herself from her toxic environment and to build a successful, decades-long career as a professional multilinguist. It’s a rewarding vocation, but a challenging her assignments with the US federal government take her on some hair-raisingly dangerous journeys, some to countries with unstable governments and even active war zones. But these sometimes-harrowing experiences teach her how to open the “windows” around her, unearth her true self, and develop a healthy sense of self-worth—and ultimately, paradoxically, her work and travel so far from home allow her to come home to herself.

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Excerpt

I’ve traveled to many places through the years. After each trip, I returned home with hundreds of photos and souvenirs. Journals line my bookshelves, describing those places. These are the trips I
tell friends about, often comparing notes as they share tales of their equally memorable trips.

I haven’t written about those trips in this book. It covers a second set. No scrapbooks, journals, or souvenirs exist to commemorate them, except maybe a few mementos from my junior year in
college in Spain. All I have are my memories for the rest.

Most people aren’t aware I went on that second set of trips, don’t know that my work as a linguist for the government put me in the midst of a war, a coup attempt, riots. They don’t know I went to Kenya following a deadly terrorist bombing by Al-Qaeda, that I accompanied a U.S. President to Tanzania, or worked as an interpreter in Brazil’s outback, as well as in its favelas. That I went to South Africa a few short months after apartheid ended.

Many people would probably be surprised to learn that I traveled to these places in sometimes dangerous circumstances. In many ways, it surprises me too, even now. It all sounds out of character for Linda Murphy-formerly-of-Kirkwood-Missouri. People who knew me back in Kirkwood, where I lived until the age of 35, might have responded the following way if they had learned of my adventures.

“Linda Murphy? The girl who, at 22, woke her little sister up in the middle of the night to remove a Daddy Longlegs spider from her bedroom? Boy-crazy Linda, who graduated from Kirkwood High School with barely a C+ average? Who wanted nothing more than to root for the football and basketball team as a cheerleader? Whom classmates unofficially voted “sweetest” in her graduating class? What you’re telling me seems hard to believe, sounds like someone else.”

Truthfully, that’s exactly how I wanted people to think of me back when I lived in Kirkwood. That’s who I was: cute, unthreatening, occasionally sweet. When I left Kirkwood to go to Denver for college, living away from home for the first time at the age of eighteen, my reputation followed me. A friend in my dorm, a fellow freshman, loved to mock me. He acted as though he saw before him a rare species only found in captivity. After finishing dinner, topped off with a long conversation one night in our dorm cafeteria, Steve leaned forward in his metallic chair, his long legs stretched out beneath him, elbows on the table, hands cupping each side of his face. Staring at me as though trying to decipher a puzzle, he shook his head. After a few seconds he quipped:

“Murph, Murph, Murph. You’re so funny. It’s like you’ve lived in a box your entire life and your parents just released you from that box to attend college.”

I understood his point. Until leaving for Spain two years later, my junior year, that description fit. My emotional and physical worlds remained circumscribed, maybe even stunted. The windows
of my life remained largely shuttered. But then certain events occurred. I took new turns on my path: some sharp, some gentle; some gradual, some sudden. I made difficult choices while still other decisions occurred without my consent or control.

I didn’t immediately find a way out of that box my friend referred to, but chinks started appearing in its walls, small at first, then gradually increasing in size, narrow openings that let in light, air, ideas, forcing me to look outside, to look beyond myself in order to find myself.

Those windows materialized as a result of studying various languages, along with subsequent work assignments to various parts of the world, places these languages led me. Each language in its own way introduced me to new ideas, new people, new ways of looking at myself, at my life. First Spanish, then Portuguese, French, German, Russian….eventually Xhosa, Amharic, Shona, Swahili, and others, till more than a dozen filled my coffer. These languages became my guides, blowing out holes in that original box in which I’d languished. They introduced me to new ways of thriving, to new ways of seeing myself, of seeing others.

Eventually, I altered my self-concept, looked beyond the environment in which I’d grown up, beyond ideas I’d clung to like lifeboats the first twenty years of my life. Languages and travel exposed me to disparate geographical regions, to the different values people cherish. They enabled me to become friends with all types of people, exposed me to different ways of living. In short, they expanded my once myopic vision. They took me by the hand and over the course of the next almost-50 years instructed me to look at this, and that, and this other thing. To reconsider this, and that, and other things. So I did. In the process I learned, grew, overcame challenges, discovered clues to finding the authentic me, to finding where I personally fit into this marvelous planet.

A paradox exists: in taking me away from English, my first language, these languages led me back home to myself…This book reveals those journeys.

About the Author

Linda Murphy Marshall is a translator and linguist whose work has been published in numerous literary journals, including the Los Angeles Review, Blue Earth Review and many more. Her first memoir, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery, received a starred review from Kirkus. She lives in Columbia, Maryland with her husband.

Marshall worked as a senior language analyst and senior intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency for over thirty years. She currently serves on the board of the National Museum of Language and has been a docent at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. since 2016.

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