Plucky Charms

Bold Geraldine, Shy Geraldine

They got to be such friends, in part, because Brooks's charmed life began with her being sick a lot.

Her American-born father, Lawrie Brooks, was an itinerant big-band singer who'd settled down in Australia as a newspaper proofreader. Her mother, Gloria, had been a radio announcer in Canberra. Brooks grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney where, not long after she started school -- as she reports in her 1998 memoir, "Foreign Correspondence" -- medical tests showed she had "serious blood anomalies."

Her doctors thought this meant rheumatic fever and, fearing strain on her heart, forbade her to walk for more than a month. The bad news, over the next few years, was recurring illness and social isolation. The good news was, in effect, home schooling: "magical times when I basked in my mother's undivided attention."

Eventually she became healthy and went back to school. But when she got to the University of Sydney, a couple of very different sides to her personality -- call them Bold Geraldine and Shy Geraldine -- were still at war inside her.

Bold Geraldine was the 12-year-old who'd risen to her feet in religion class to denounce the pope's views on birth control. A few years later, she could be found leading a posse of Led Zeppelin fans over a wall topped with barbed wire to get into a sold-out concert.

Shy Geraldine, by contrast, found being on her own at a big university daunting. She was terrified to open her mouth in class, unless the class adjourned to a pub and she could have a drink first.

" 'Painfully shy' is a very accurate term," she says. Needing to resolve the tension between "wanting risk and adventure and just not being able to talk to strangers," she turned to her mother -- "a great wise person" -- for help. "Her advice was, 'Look, figure out what it is that you're afraid of and just keep doing it and doing it until you stop being afraid.' "

This explains why Brooks signed up for the drama society. And it helps explain why, more than a decade later, she said yes when the Wall Street Journal asked her to cover the Middle East.

When she'd first launched herself on a newspaper career, she says, she'd overcome her shyness in part "because it wasn't me making the call, it was the Sydney Morning Herald." She'd won a scholarship to the graduate school of journalism at Columbia, where she'd met her future husband, Tony Horwitz. She'd been hired by the Journal's Cleveland bureau, quit to return to Australia when her father became ill, and been hired back when the paper decided it needed someone to cover Australasia.

But the Middle East was terrifying on a whole new scale.

"I was completely unqualified," she says. She'd never been a real foreign correspondent, certainly not one whose to-pack checklist would include both a chador and a bulletproof vest -- not to mention the "big pile of State Department briefing books on my lap, you know: crash course in Yemen."

Here comes that pealing laugh again. She says it was a year before she had a clue how to do the job.