"And there I was, eating alone in the most expensive restaurant in the wealthiest country in the world, thinking about the demise of my marriage. What's money good for?" 

Adriana Páramo muses in Good Girls Don't Sing La Bamba. Through evocative letters to her mother, the author chronicles accounts of her failing marriage, an extra-marital affair, and her humiliating downfall, all set against the backdrop of a wealthy kingdom torn between Muslim traditions and Westernization. Her chaotic personal life in Kuwait ran parallel to her life as an anthropologist, teacher, and activist. This is how she came face to face with a culture in which slavery is alive and well, and back-street abortions, alcoholism, drug smuggling, prostitution, domestic violence, and social inequality are as rampant as in any country of the Western hemisphere.

During her four years in Kuwait, she worked exclusively with women. The women's stories—her young students and the Indian workers, the haves and the have-nots—and the analyses of the culture are interspersed with the author's personal struggles. Páramo's unique blend of ethnography, memoir, research, quest, epistolary, and poetry creates a new language to describe a sustained exploration of women's lives in Kuwait and the uncanny ways in which we find love.