Booktalk & signing with Sarah Thebarge Author of The Invisible Girls
Booktalk & signing with
Sarah Thebarge
Author of
The Invisible Girls
Wednesday, September 11 @ 7 p.m.
Olympic Room, Main Library
A girl scarred by her past.
A refugee mother uncertain of her future.
Five little girls who brought them together.
After surviving a grueling battle with breast cancer, Sarah Thebarge
fled her successful career, her Ivy League education, and a failed
relationship on the East Coast and started over in Portland, Oregon.
was an Ivy League graduate, about to get engaged and begin a
promising career in medical reporting, when she was diagnosed with
breast cancer at age 27. After losing everything but her life to
cancer, she fled from the east coast to Portland, Oregon, and started
over.
While riding the train in Portland, she was captivated by a single
Somali mom and her daughters, who looked exhausted and lost. A few
days after the train ride, Thebarge went looking for them to see if
they were okay. When she finally found them, they were living in
abject poverty, with no toiletries, no furniture, and no change of
clothes. They also had no food, and their mom had resorted to
Dumpster-diving behind a grocery store, feeding her girls the moldy
bread she found so they wouldn’t starve to death.
Thebarge learned they had escaped as political refugees from Somali
a short time before, where the capital, Mogadishu, had been named the
most dangerous city in the world. But now that they had come to
America, their lives were still in danger. The girls’ father had
left the family soon after they arrived in the U.S., and their mother
was left to care for five girls under the age of 10 by herself,
without any language or job skills.
Thebarge forgot her personal struggles as she helped the Somali
family access resources and learn how to navigate life in America.
And, as Thebarge saved the Somali girls’ lives, these resilient
girls rescued Thebarge by showing her how to love and be loved again.
_The Invisible Girls_ weaves the real-life struggles and adventures
of refugees learning to live in a new culture with the harrowing
story of Thebarge’s battle with cancer. The book invites readers to
see invisible, marginalized people with new eyes. Because, as Thebarge
learned, sometimes love and redemption are hidden in connection with
the most unexpected people, in the most unusual places.
_SARAH THEBARGE grew up as a pastor’s kid in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. She earned a masters degree in Medical Science from
Yale School of Medicine and was studying Journalism at Columbia
University when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27.
Sarah’s writing has appeared in Christianity Today,
BurnsideWriters.com, Relevant, TheOoze.com, Raysd, and Just
Between Us. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon_
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event
David Domkoski
Community Relations Manager
253.292.2001 ext. 1220
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