It’s not easy being a foreigner. Certainly not easy being an immigrant. While Kathy Woodrow is neither of those things (for now), she is profoundly lonely, and her passion for wine is a “coping mechanism with a cork” behind which lurks a drinking problem. It all comes to a head at a speed dating event, where, after a few too many glasses of bad Pinot and a heavy pour of her trademark cynicism, Kathy has a dramatic fall. The head injury lands her in a coma. When Kathy wakes up, she speaks with a thick Bosnian accent. According to the baffled neurologist, she has “foreign accent syndrome”—a real but extraordinarily rare condition, with only 78 known cases in recorded history. And just like that, Kathy becomes a foreigner. Not in the legal sense. But in the deeply inconvenient, identity‑shattering, “why is the barista asking me where I’m from?” kind of way. Now a foreigner—to herself, to her friends, to the world she thought she knew.