Marielo: A Foreign Service Life in Diary and Letters

Book excerpt: About the Book In assembling and organizing his wife Mary’s letters and diary, M. Wesley “Wes” Shoemaker’s constant goal has been to allow the documents to speak through her voice without intruding himself unnecessarily into the narrative. Yet it cannot be denied that he is the Wes who appears throughout, and that, in addition to the main theme of Mary’s life and Foreign Service Career, it is also a story of a marriage lasting over fifty-one years, in spite of the fact that fifteen of those years, their separate career patterns kept them separated for eight months each year. Containing a total of 191 letters (116 of which are to Wes), Marielo: A Foreign Service Life in Diary and Letters chronicles Mary’s incredible life as a Foreign Service Officer through the slowly dying medium of letter writing, which provided a lifeline that held their marriage together over the years and further explains how their long-distance relationship survived over the years of separation. About the Author M. Wesley “Wes” Shoemaker was a Foreign Service Officer and has been posted at locations all over the world. He later resigned from this role to enter a doctoral program in Russian history at Syracuse University and went on to teach at Lynchburg College.