I love G. Willow Wilson's writings. I loved her Ms. Marvel comics first, and Alif the Unseen clinched it. She's up there with Neil Gaiman for me, as one of the best speculative fiction authors of our time. It took me awhile to track down a copy of her memoir, but it was worth every moment of calling local bookstores and browsing libraries.

In The Butterfly Mosque, Wilson recounts her life at Boston University and her years in Cairo. To say those years were life-changing does not even begin to cover it. Breaking away from her atheist American upbringing, Wilson contracts a chronic disease, converts to Islam, graduates university, moves to Cairo to teach English, marries the gentle & loving Omar, moves twice within Cairo, visits Iran, gets investigated by the FBI, and moves back to the States. The most deeply personal changes, her conversion and marriage, she must do multiple times to fulfill the Egyptian/American cultural, secular governmental, and state religion standards. At one point, Wilson jokes that she and Omar have technically married over four times.

But listing the events of the memoir don't much touch its heart. Wilson's trademark ethereal prose and piercing insight is polished to mirror sheen here. One reason it took me so long to read Butterly Mosque is I wanted to savor each line and continue to live in the peaceful moments it brought me. Wilson's ruminations on Islam and what it brought her echoed my own thoughts on Catholicism. Her tender yet persistent attempts to understand Egyptian culture and Omar made my heart ache with memory.

One theme that hit me like a baseball bat was the balance Wilson struck between her USA birthplace and new home in Cairo. In a lot of stories, the traveler either gives up on their original culture in favor of "going native" or sticks to it, refusing to bend for the country they find themselves in. The former is especially tempting with USA's current situation, but Wilson does neither. She keeps abreast of American Muslim community news & USA political news, write articles for USA magazines about Egypt, and mourns her disconnect with the USA. Meanwhile she does her utmost to adapt to Egyptian cultural mores, to the point that other people remark how she's "a little bit Arab now." Like with Alif the Unseen, Wilson marries together two seemingly disparate things to fantastic effect, making the reader realize that Islamic Egypt and the Christian USA are not so different after all. Pun intended.

I could discuss other themes in the memoir, but then I'd be here all day: Wilson's brilliant pen also inks topics like moderate Islam vs extreme Islam; terrorism; Islamic law; police states and the Patriot Act; hijabi culture; and the real world worth of Ivy League education. Put together, The Butterfly Mosque is heart-fluttering delight, a feast of cross-cultural empathy and love, and meaningful and important book. I recommend it to literally every American, Muslim or not.