Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family

Said’s aching memoir explores her coming-of-age as a Christian Arab-American on New York’s Upper West Side. Her father, Palestinian-American scholar and human-rights activist Edward Said, was always her “temperamental soul mate”—passionate about art and literature, but not good with practical details—while her Lebanese-American mother managed daily life with aplomb. Said describes feeling divided by her open-minded, heterogeneous neighborhood near Columbia University. Her birth in 1974 coincided with the start of Lebanon’s decades-long civil war and continually exacerbated anxieties about her “otherness.” She relates how the escalating violence and growing anti-Arab sentiment in the U.S. eroded her self-confidence and contributed to an eating disorder. She admits to resenting her parents’ secular-humanist ideals as a child, and her brother’s smoother mix of Arab and American, heightening her feelings of “otherness.” Some readers may find her use of “Daddy” and “Mommy” oddly regressive, but these terms nicely reveal what she really desired from her parents. Empowering experiences like taking acting classes and joining an Arab-American theater group balance unsettling accounts of a harrowing 1992 visit to Gaza and her father’s 2003 death. Her complex persona, self-deprecating humor, and focus on the personal rather than the political broaden the appeal of Said’s book beyond any particular ethnic, cultural, or religious audience. (Aug.)