Am I really famous in Brazil? Despite the hundreds of messages I’ve received from Brazilians insisting I am, I still don’t believe it. It’s just too surreal for my brain to process. This surely must be a highly ambitious prank pulled by several bored teenagers in South America.

Here’s the abbreviated version of how I became “famous???” in Brazil:

• I posted a roundup of all the books I was reading for the B countries on my Read Around the World quest.
• I had decided to read The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis for Brazil.
• TONS of Brazilians responded with comments like, You are going to love that! and Best book ever!
• By the time I got to Brazil, I worried that the book had been overhyped and I would be disappointed.
• I started the book.
• Within a few pages, I was OBSESSED. Best. Book. Ever.
• With only 100 pages left, I felt inspired to make this video:

And then that video went viral–and I didn’t even realize the scope of what was happening at the time, because it had been shared on X and then effected Amazon sales and then it was reported by the Brazilian news. I think I finally realized that Something Big was happening in my life when a journalist at Brazil’s CNN contacted me for a television interview.

At first, I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the response, but as I explain during this episode, the experience of going viral in Brazil has opened my heart to a flood of love and made my soul sparkle like a disco ball. Because did you know Brazil is the most loving corner of the internet? My siblings were reading the comments on my videos and could not believe that they were 99.9% positive. I was pleasantly surprised because when I saw that there were thousands of comments, I assumed that folks would be trashing my review/project/face/etc. because that’s how American trolls operate.

Americans could learn a thing or two from Brazil.

In the viral video, I joked that I now had a side quest to learn Portuguese. Many Brazilians took this literally, and tons of people offered to give me free Portuguese lessons. I freaked out again. Me? Learn Portuguese? It’s supposed to be an incredibly difficult language to learn! Besides, I’ve been using Duolingo to learn French for several years now. If I really wanted to learn Portuguese, I could do that after I became fluent in French,.

And yet, the idea of learning Portuguese became as intriguing and persistent as my call to embark on this Read Around the World quest, so I took Duolingo’s first Portuguese lesson. And then another and another until I was hooked, and had abandoned French completely, and after I was invited to speak at a literary festival in São Paulo, I found an app called Preply and signed up for one-on-one Portuguese lessons with a lovely Brazilian lady.

Agora eu falo português como um bebe.

But I’m learning and I’m obsessed with this side quest. My fifteen minutes of Brazilian fame has lasted much longer than I could have ever predicted, and at the beginning of my quest, I never thought one of my book reviews could go viral in such an exuberant and effervescent way. I’m loving this new twist to my Read Around the World adventure and shimmering with excitement for my trip next week to São Paulo! And no matter how this goes, I’m obsessed with the Portuguese language. But that’s another episode.