In Pursuit of Disobedient Women

A Memoir of Love, Rebellion, and Family, Far Away

By: Dionne Searcey

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

When a reporter for The New York Times uproots her family to move to West Africa, she manages her new role as breadwinner while finding women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a forgotten place for much of the Western world.

"A story you will not soon forget." (Kathryn Bigelow, Academy Award-winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty)

In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside-down as they struggled to figure out their place in this new region, along with a new family dynamic where she was the main breadwinner flying off to work while her husband stayed behind to manage the home front.

In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, center on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, covering stories like Boko Haram - conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent.

Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered. Listeners will find Searcey’s struggles, both with her family and those of the women she meets along the way, familiar and relatable in this smart and moving memoir.

©2020 Dionne Searcey (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Dionne Searcey’s In Pursuit of Disobedient Women offers a candid and riveting backstory of the powerful series she crafted on Boko Haram and independent women in Nigeria during her tenure as West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times. Through Searcey’s stunning descriptions and humorously self-deprecating honesty, we gain insight into the relentless (and at times, frustrating) reporting required for such outstanding journalism, while shedding light on the never-ending juggle to balance work and home life as a foreign correspondent." (Lynsey Addario, photojournalist and New York Times best-selling author of It’s What I Do and Of Love & War)

"In Pursuit of Disobedient Women is an urgent and necessary work, taking the reader into the heart of one of the most dangerous terrorist militias on earth. Searcey’s fearless reporting on Boko Haram’s survivors is as compassionate as it is unrelenting. It’s a story you will not soon forget." (Kathryn Bigelow, Academy Award-winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty)

"In Pursuit of Disobedient Women beautifully chronicles the sometimes harrowing challenges women in West Africa face as well as their triumphs. Searcey portrays African women for what they are: strong and clever, like women everywhere. She weaves stories of family life and motherhood throughout her tales, rounding out a unique and relatable portrait of womanhood." (Oby Ezekwesili, global women’s advocate, founder of Bring Back Our Girls and former education minister of Nigeria)

A fresh perspective on parenting and perils.

Amazing look into the lives and cultures surrounding Boko-Haram. As a single man who maintains hope to raise children in this world, this was critical information.

What a story!

A heartbreaking book featuring stories from survivors of Boko Haram, with some domestic drama.

Writer and Story!

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. A memoir of a journalist in West Africa, her work, her family, her life. 👍

A journalist's memoir

I bought this book based on the March 20, 2020 review in the New York Times. Shame on me for buying a book based solely on a review in the same paper for which the book author is a reporter. The review focused almost entirely on Searcey’s coverage of stories in West Africa, a region I was interested in learning more about. And indeed, those sections of the book are compelling and edifying. Unfortunately, much of the book is, as the subtitle indicates, a memoir of a fairly insufferable journalist who feels sorry for herself, while realizing how pathetic she is to feel sorry for herself. She never comes close to making peace with how to blend being a mother, a woman with a career, a feminist, a wife - but she slogs through these issues endlessly, as if she is unique in trying to reconcile them. At times she applies her tortured lense to the women she covers, who have radically different realities. It’s grating. Her ongoing descriptions of her flirtations with a married photo-journalist were cringeworthy. The book is worth a skim for the coverage beyond her memoir.

Awful

I did not care for this book at all. It’s seems to me she was just talking about how great she was and what an inconvenience. Her husband and children were.