Immersion: A Linguist’s Memoir

Fans of the self-discovering journeys in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Andrew McCarthy’s The Longest Way Home will love diving into linguist Linda Murphy Marshall’s adventure-filled international journey as she overcomes her past to find her place in the world--all over the world.

Immersion is a memoir that takes the reader on a captivating emotional and physical journey through Linda Murphy Marshall’s life: from the longstanding, crippling impact of family members’ low expectations and abuse, to her discovery as a young adult that she possesses special skills in foreign languages.

Linda is taught from an early age that she has little of value to offer the world. But her love of and affinity for languages enables her to create a new life--to separate herself from her toxic environment and to build a successful, decades-long career as a professional multilinguist. It’s a rewarding vocation, but a challenging one: her assignments with the US federal government take her on some hair-raisingly dangerous journeys, some to countries with unstable governments and even active war zones. But these sometimes-harrowing experiences teach her how to open the ＂windows＂ around her, unearth her true self, and develop a healthy sense of self-worth--and ultimately, paradoxically, her work and travel so far from home allow her to come home to herself.

Linda Murphy Marshall is a multi-linguist and writer with a PhD in Hispanic languages and literature, a master’s in Spanish, and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Maryland Literary Review, the Ocotillo Review, Chestnut Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, PopMatters, Storgy [UK], The Bark Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Critical Read. She was featured in American Writers Review, where she was an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Fiction Contest. She was long-listed in Strands Publishers’s 2021 International Flash Fiction Contest, and was a finalist in the 2020 Annual Adelaide Literary Contest for one of her essays. In addition, she is currently a reader for Fourth Genre and a translation editor for the Los Angeles Review. Her sketches and paintings have been featured in art shows and galleries. She lives in Columbia, MD.