Who am I? Who were these people who made me who I am? And, what was this place? Was it ever what I thought it was?

For celebrated journalist and author Julie Salamon, these recently became central questions. Salamon spent the first 18 years of her life Seaman, Ohio, a town that is part of the American heartland, a repository of mythology and misunderstanding. Seaman, Ohio, remains central to her identity, despite having lived in New York City for more than four decades, the place where her husband and she raised their children, three cats, and two dogs, and built her career and community. And yet, she could never shake the attachment to her childhood town. In fact, in almost every official author bio, it's put it right up front: "raised in a rural town in Appalachian Ohio." In between projects, she kept going back. Her office is filled with files of interviews conducted with people there over the years. She always was wondering if the home of her memories was truly the way she remembered it.

Seaman is located in Adams County, which is routinely ranked one of the two poorest of Ohio's 88 counties. In both 2016 and 2020, the county voted for Donald Trump. That reality made Salamon's examination of her childhood feel urgent, particularly because Salamon and her family were anomalies. They were immigrants from a foreign country. They were Democrats. They were Jewish. In looking back, what Salamon remembers most about this place - despite her otherness - was the overwhelming feeling of acceptance and love. Love for her family, love for the land, and, in particular, love for best friends, Candee and June.

In Unlikely Friends, Salamon tells the intimate story about a conservative backwater that brought together three girls from different backgrounds - Julie, June, and Candee - respectively, Jewish, Black, and Appalachian. Girls who, in all likelihood, wouldn't have become friends if they had lived anywhere else. While it might appear to be a small tale, as the country's political divide widens, this personal history of unlikely connection is more pressing, more universal than ever. This is a story about race and religion, about country and community, about the legends people create to make sense of their lives. What Salamon discovers along the way is that memories are indeed complicated. While her fondness for the place and her happy childhood memories aren't figments of her imagination, the rosy depiction of the past has been incomplete all along. That, like life, memory is a work in progress.