What's going on with the bookshop?

And when are we moving to Italy?

Approximately every day, at least one reader asks me some variation of the above two questions. And, fair. This publication is, after all, called “Escape to the Bookshop.” So when will I finally manage to escape to the bookshop? And since the (hypothetical) bookshop is in Italy, what in the world am I still doing in Amsterdam?

Which made me think, maybe it’s time to give you a little update on my whereabouts and whyabouts. And even a little introduction too? Because when I last did that, I think Escape to the Bookshop had a total of maybe twenty readers.

So, hello again! I’m Sarah, and I grew up in California, in a family with five kids and a big backyard. We were all homeschooled, and my mom had a pretty relaxed definition of what that meant, so I spent most of my time reading, writing poetry, and directing backyard plays with my siblings and our (also homeschooled) neighbours.

University was the first time I ever set foot in a classroom. And I loved that too. What’s not to love? More books, bigger library. I started out majoring in philosophy. At the beginning of my sophomore year I wanted a challenge, so I decided to take Russian 101. Russian was full, so instead I ended up taking Arabic. I kept on taking Arabic every semester after that, which led to me majoring in Near Eastern Studies.

I spent my final semester on an intensive Arabic study abroad in Damascus, Syria. Which meant I turned 21 in by far the most foreign place I’d ever been. After that semester, we spent another two months on the road, visiting Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, and the remnants of Muslim Spain.

I consider that study abroad during the first six months of 2001 the formative experience of my life. After immersing myself in another language and culture and way of living, there was no way to go back to seeing anything from a single point of view. My worldview had become irrevocably multiple.

Also, I’d fallen in love with being Elsewhere. Home never really felt like home again.

The next thing I did was a year-and-a-half-long mission in Santiago, Chile. (I grew up Mormon, a religion I’ve since left.) The week I returned home, I met my future husband. His aunt set us up, and when he called me to ask me out, I kept forgetting English words, because I’d spoken only Spanish for so long. I was mortified, but fortunately, he ended up liking me anyway.

We’d been married a year and had a six-week-old baby when we set off on our first big adventure together: a field study trip in the Philippines. We were there four months, and it was everything we’d imagined, and more. Which I guess is how we became the kind of people who gallivant around the world with babies and toddlers in tow.

Nursing my baby on the mighty Loboc River in Bohol, Philippines.

Two years later, I was pregnant with our second child when I discovered that my husband might be eligible for an Italian passport. My head filled immediately with dreams of escape to Europe. I must have had vague ideas before, but this was the first time I realised that moving abroad—not just traveling—might actually be possible.

There was the small matter of needing birth, death and marriage certificates for all his ancestors back to his great-great grandfather in the early nineteenth century. But this was a mere detail.

(I jest. Genealogical research and document collecting became my full-time job for the next year.)

After a lot of red tape and making strategic connections in Italy, in 2008 my husband became Italian, and my life turned into this:

On our way to London to stop the visa clock and eke out a few more days on the Schengen visa (IYKYK!) while my husband’s citizenship application went through.

Which . . . may or may not look like something a normal person would want to do. For me, it was a dream come true.

My daughter collecting wildflowers in the shadow of the Bisalta, the double-peaked mountain in the Ligurian Alps that towered over our little Italian town.

We spent the next several years really trying to make that dream work, with not a whole lot in the way of financial resources. Which ended up meaning (among other things) thirteen different homes in four countries in four years. Including moving to Italy three separate times, and never managing to stay.

During most of the 2011 Arab Spring, we lived in Hammamet, Tunisia. That’s my kids on the beach, watching the fishermen.

Someday I’ll tell you more about all that. Suffice it to say that we were living as “digital nomads” before the term existed. Constantly trying to make ends meet while parenting two toddlers and trying to convince ourselves that our life was amazing.

Which it was, don’t get me wrong. We loved each other desperately, and we managed to pack more adventures into those years than a lot of people have in a lifetime. Every time we had to move back to the United States to get back on our feet, pretty soon we were moving abroad again.

In Ireland we had a cool friend who would break us into abandoned Regency mansions.

Still, despite the excitement, our life eventually became exhausting.

In 2015 we finally did something different. Instead of trying to move to Italy again and ending up somewhere else, we decided to be more practical. We took a look at other European countries, and looked for one with a good job market and good schools (because yes, we’d been homeschooling our kids all this time). That’s how we picked The Netherlands.

Exactly a decade ago today, we moved to Amsterdam with a ten-year-old, a seven-year-old, and two suitcases each. My husband and I had both come from families who moved a lot (although not as much as us!), and we wanted to give our kids the gift of staying in one place. But also, a place we liked.

We enrolled them in Dutch school, and we both got local jobs. A year later, we bought the tiniest, cutest Amsterdam flat, shipped over all our belongings, and brought home a tiny ball of fluff. And that’s how we got our European dream: a house, two kids, a dog, and an entire decade in one place.

Christmas in Malta the year we bought a house, got a dog, and decided to stay in Amsterdam indefinitely.

So yes, we’ve spent the past ten years in Amsterdam, and she’s been very good to us. But we never quite gave up on that first dream of Italy, even if (like many Italians themselves) for practical reasons we had to seek economic opportunity elsewhere in Europe.

Awhile ago, my husband and I started thinking about what might be next. Our daughter was starting her second year at University of Amsterdam, and our son was going into his final year of Dutch high school. And of course, the first thought we had was Italy.

In fact, we were thinking about it so much that last February, we went on a holiday to our favourite little Italian town, just the two of us. We jokingly called it our “first house-hunting trip.” Because why not look at a couple of houses, just for kicks?

You can probably guess where this is going. One of the places we looked at was this little stone house with its own Medieval tower.

Before we knew it, we were back a few months later, signing the paperwork to buy the house. Which had a wonderful cellar with soaring ceilings, just begging to be turned into the bookshop of my dreams.

Our plan at the time was to move into our little stone house in Italy in the summer of 2025. Which, yes, would be a few months from now if all had gone as planned. But as sometimes happens, life intervened. Last October, our seventeen-year-old son was in a serious accident. We were incredibly lucky not to lose him. He was in the hospital for weeks, then bedridden at home for two months. For the past three months, he’s been slowly learning how to walk again.

The doctors expect him to eventually make a full recovery. But needless to say, we will not be moving to Italy this summer. He’s missed a lot of school, so he’ll need to repeat his final year of high school, and we want to be here to fully support him as long as he needs. So we’ll be in Amsterdam longer than we planned.

In the meantime, I’ll be making as many trips out to Italy and the future bookshop as I can, and sharing every morsel of progress. And I’ll also be learning to fall in love with Amsterdam again, and sharing my favourite corners of the city, with a focus on the beautiful and bookish.

So that’s me. And whether this is your first or thirtieth post on Escape to the Bookshop, I’m delighted to have you along with me on this journey. Yesterday I checked the back-end stats and discovered that Escape to the Bookshop is read across 62 countries and 46 US states. Which is, like, the most thrilling thing that’s happened to me this week.

In such a volatile time for international politics, it makes my restless little heart happy to imagine us all, stretched across the globe, united in our love of books and beauty in this world.

So If you feel inclined, I’d love for you to introduce yourself in the comments section. Who are you? Where are you from? What brought you to Escape to the Bookshop? And what would you like me to write more about?

Want to hear what happened last time I went to Narni? Read this: