Taking The Long Way Home

“I thought I was escaping war. Instead, I found my way home.”

In the early 1970s, a wannabe hippie with a rootless, dysfunctional childhood searched for peace amid campus protests and cultural upheaval. Just weeks from earning her journalism degree, she faced a life-changing decision: let her new husband be drafted to Vietnam — or join him in the Peace Corps and leave the U.S. behind.

Taking the Long Way Home: A Peace Corps Memoir of Brazil and Finding Home in the 1970s is the true story of a young American couple’s transformative journey to Northeast Brazil — a region still reeling from a failed revolution. There, amid intense heat, poverty, and beauty, they built a school, launched grassroots projects, and found themselves immersed in a world both foreign and deeply human.

Now, decades later, as her generation once again faces deep questions about democracy and America’s role on the world stage, Anne Spry reflects on the lessons Brazil taught her: about identity, resilience, service — and the quiet, enduring work of finding a home within your own heart. A moving coming-of-age memoir for baby boomers, Peace Corps alumni, travel memoir lovers, and readers who believe that growth often begins far from where we started.