"... at various times in my life, my mother would turn to me and say in English: 'Never Marry a Diplomat.' (...) Was she being facetious in making such a remark or deadly serious?"

While Eva Jarring Corones' parents took up diplomatic posts in places like Teheran, Stockholm, New York, Washington and Moscow, rubbing shoulders with world leaders such as John F. Kennedy, she lived in luxurious surroundings with cooks and maids. Yet, as her father Gunnar Jarring wrote in his memoirs:

"It was not a happy Eva that we parted from. In those days it was one of the disadvantages of the diplomatic life: to be forced to leave a post without any consideration being taken of what the parents and a lonely fourteen-year-old girl-child thought and felt."