Excerpt from my TEDGlobal 2009 application.

If a friend were to describe your accomplishments in up to three sentences what would he or she say?

"Her infectious enthusiasm and generosity in sharing the information she’s gathered convinces me I can do anything I really want to and I come away from our contacts with a buoyant new sense of myself and concrete ideas about my options going forward. With all her planning under the surface it seems like she can stop on a dime and still have five cents left, acting with an accuracy, facility and swiftness many people find baffling and chalk up to luck. Time and again she’s proved a feline ability to somehow land on her feet, where ever she is, no matter what kind of freefall of lost connections preceded her leap: friends, family, town, nation, job and industry -- language, even.”

What other achievements would you like to share?

Coined the concept “expat harem” by reappropriating the Muslim harem from erroneous Western stereotype and innuendo and drawing on an Eastern feminist continuum to give new meaning to lives of culturally aware global nomads struggling with issues of assimilation and identity. Created a worldwide harem of my expat peers through the publication of a #1 internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed collection of expatriate literature (Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey), which also provides a positive new cultural context for my writing career and my conflicted expat mindset. Extending these central themes threaded through my first book -- the feminine voice, the struggle for identity and issues of personal dynamics small and large – into a most personal account, I am currently fulfilling my best friend’s deathbed wish I write her psychohistory by completing my forensic memoir of friendship with a multiple personality this year.