Paula Boswell was born and raised in The Netherlands. She met her husband, John, in Lisbon, Portugal, where she worked as a secretary to the Dutch Embassy. She moved to the United States in 1952 and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1956. Danville has been her home for the last 40 years. She has two children and four grandchildren. “No Ordinary Life” is her first book. In essence, the entire book is her bio. It’s written in short, easy-to-read, often humorous, vignettes. You will laugh and cry with her as she shares her fascinating story as the wife of a Marine, a mother, a real estate agent and broker, a student at UC Berkeley, a high school foreign language teacher, and last but not least the originator of a successful business.

Why did she write this book?

During his lifetime John gave many talks about his forty horrifying months as a POW of the Japanese. Though often encouraged to publish his story, he felt enough books had already been written on the subject. He did write many of his experiences down, though, either in long-hand or on a manual typewriter.

After John’s death Paula looked at the many pages he wrote, regretting that her husband had never put them into book form. In the meantime, Paula was often asked to tell groups about her experiences during the war in Nazi-occupied Holland. When friends started to encourage her to write a book about her own life, she decided to put the two stories together. She had plenty of material; not only did she write a diary during the “hunger winter” of 1944/45, but from the time she had left Holland she had written her mother long, weekly, letters. Amazingly, her mother kept every one of her letters, written from 1949 till about 1983, neatly stored in three-ring binders.

Before her death in 1988, her mother gave Paula back all those the letters she had kept, a total of over 2500.

After the death of her husband, Paula started to read those, hoping they would bring some comfort in her grief. She has silently thanked her mother many times for leaving this treasure behind. Her book could not have been written without the details about her life she found in the letters she herself had written during thirty-four years.