my mom's famous friend

Everybody has that cool friend from way back when they brag about knowing, no matter how well they may know that friend now. Elisabeth Bumiller is my mom's that friend. They wrote together for the Walnut Hills' Chatterbox (the name of the newspaper that somehow still lives on today despite its...weirdness) and then Liz went on to work for the Washington Post and the New York Times. Whenever her bylines show up in the Times, my mom gets all excited and starts talking about when they were both writers! It's very cute. In the 80s, Liz's husband, also a writer, was sent to Delhi to be the the South Asian bureau chief for the Washington Post and she came along for the ride, writing the occasional human interest piece about India and researching what would eventually become this book. It's a bit dry and journalist-y, but not enough to detract from how fascinating these stories are.

And not enough to detract me from my sheer and utter panic about leaving on Friday. FRIDAY.