I read this book at the recommendation of my friend Casira, although it’s been high on my diaspora literature list for years. This memoir is bookended poorly, starting with an eat-pray-love-esque road trip across the US searching for purpose and ending with a hardly believable scene of “healing” her troubled relationship with her father.
In a creative writing class once, a poet once told me good writing requires at least two of the following: 1) incredible personal experience 2) astute observation or 3) excellent fluency and artistry with language. Of course, a master writer would have all three. Jarrar mainly has #1 with a spark of #3 sometimes. The memoir is compelling because of the unenviable amount of abuse Jarrar suffers, which she narrates bluntly and painfully. We get glimpses of child abuse, overcontrolling parents, abusive partners, and even dystopic scenes with Israel locking her in a holding cell and preventing her from returning to Palestine. Her descriptions of kink are clumsy, however, as well as some of her expression of her own feelings around the messy bits of race, gender, and queerness. The narration of kink especially reads as the journal of someone who just experienced something, not someone who has thought about the discourse around it and is entering that discourse thoughtfully. Even so, it was a captivating read, even as it fell into so many traumatophobic tropes. 3 out of 5.