Maine, The Magazine Profile, by Debra Spark

In the summer of 2007, Susan Conley, her husband, and her two boys abruptly moved from Portland to Beijing to take advantage of a job offer. The couple had a single month to pack up and rent their Portland home and to find an apartment and a school for their sons in China. Just as abruptly, Conley returned to the United States in May 2008. The visit wasn't to Woolwich, where she grew up, or Phippsburg, where she has always spent her summers, but to doctors in Boston. While in China, she had discovered a lump in her breast that proved to be cancerous. The Foremost Good Fortune is Conley's memoir of her experience, less a cancer tale than, as Conley puts it, "a close examination of what happens to a family when it is dislocated culturally and within disease." Her surprisingly celebratory book describes Conley trying to adjust to her new circumstances. In China, she purches a Buddha head at a flea market to stave off illness, she roams back alleys for the city's best dumplings, and, in an effort to make friends, she finds herself at a dinner party where chicken beaks float in the soup. "A lot of expats don't like where they are from," says Conley. "They are happy to trade the old life for a new glamorous expat life." But Conley loved her Maine life, what with her good friends and the Telling Room, the Portland creative writing lab and literary hub, which she co-founded. Conley and her family decided to return to Maine early in 2010, and her memoir is due out from Knopf in February 2011.