PAMELA BRADLEY

‘Although I was not to recognise it at the time, the day I walked into Nefertiti Street in Luxor was a pivotal point in my life’.

 

Have you ever had a gut feeling or a niggling voice in your head telling you that you are not living the life you feel you want to live? Have you been on the verge of making serious choices about your life but hesitated to take the risk due to lack of courage or fear of what others might think of you?

 

In the late 1980s, I was living a comfortable existence in an affluent Sydney suburb. I’d been married for over twenty-five years, had three grown sons and a steady job teaching History. Yet I was becoming increasingly fearful of not having enough time left to follow the path my inner voice had been urging me to take since childhood.

 

Nefertiti Street is the story of how I took that path and changed my life by embarking on a series of physical, emotional and spiritual journeys to Egypt between 1989 and 1994. While I was seeking adventure, taking risks and experiencing challenges in that alien culture, I re-evaluated my life. Ultimately, I ended my long and traditional marriage and went to live on my own in the inner city of Sydney

 

Although not looking for another partner, I eventually found love in Egypt but was faced with the fact that the man with whom I developed a deep connection was not only 28 years my junior, but a Muslim as well. After much analysis and soul-searching, I decided to risk being branded a ‘cradle snatcher, ‘a seducer’, ‘a mad woman’, and to go with my heart.

 

To live the life I wanted, I had to ignore what people thought of me and embrace the unknown. In 1994, I married again and prepared to move into uncharted territory.

 

I believe that Nefertiti Street shares relevant and powerful themes for a range of readers, particularly women. It :

• is about having the courage to travel down a new path in life without knowing where it will lead.

• reveals facets of an entirely different culture.

• helps us see that love does not take age into account.

• encourages us to take responsibility for the choices we make in life.

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Reviews of Nefertiti Street

 

Sam Allender, Southern Highland News, book review, 29/8/2008.

 

There is such honesty in the pages of Nefertiti Street that there’s almost an element of voyeurism in the reading. Ultimately an uplifting story, Pamela leaves her readers with a sense of hope and possibility. 

 

To all those people who read Eat, Pray, Love and were disappointed, this is the book you should have been reading. Nefertiti Street is the story of a woman in her late 40s who becomes increasingly aware of her slow spiritual starvation in the midst of her affluent lifestyle.

 

Instead of wailing about the boredom and pointlessness in her life, she draws eloquent verbal pictures that leave no room for doubt. Rather than smothering the reader with layer upon layer of life-style generated misery, she gently causes you to question the direction your own life is taking.

In the late 1980s, Pamela decides from the comfort of her North Shore home in Sydney to change her life. She begins with little wobbly, indecisive steps, that strengthen over time into bold, determined strides.

Indulging a fascination with Egypt held since childhood, she takes a series of journeys that change her life irrevocably. Her marriage to an Egyptian Muslin man 28 years her junior, is the culmination of the book, but certainly not the guts of the story.

 

Nefertiti Street is about how a woman approaching middle age took some chances to change her life and how shedding the trappings enabled her to embrace the unknown with renewed enthusiasm.

 

For anyone who has ever been to Egypt, this book is a treat that takes you right back to the dusty streets and the teeming markets. Egypt is not a kind country for an assertive, independent Western woman and it’s exciting to be there with her.

 

There are points in her story that make you wince, but Pamela’s determination to plumb her own depths is applaudable. Despite its somewhat exotic settings, Pamela is every woman. We either know her or know of her, can see her turning up nervously for new-age group sessions, and empathise with her frustration and impatience.

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Patti Miller, author of Writing Your Life and The Memoir Book. 

 

I’ve just finished Nefertiti Street and want to say I found it unputdownable…strong narrative, engaging voice, evokes character, place and scene very well.