Fairy Tales of Afghanistan: One Woman’s Year of Love, Literature, Growth, And Soldiering

I, as a female soldier, spent a year in Afghanistan, alone, and this is my story. While there, I observed so much in a year: love, unicycles, and female interpreters returning home to Afghanistan for the first time since the Russian occupation. In a way it has been like a fairy tale, full of darkness, despair, and beauty. My memoir is entitled Fairy Tales of Afghanistan. It is a memoir that many females will be able to understand, a coming of age story in a war zone. All of the memoirs I have read of this war are either jocular in tone like Hemingway or about powerful females, I am neither, simply an average woman trying her best in a war zone. I have integrated the fictional past of Austen, Anderson, and of course Dickens with the experiences of the present, as literature above all else sustained me.