In the conclusion, Said writes about how she needed to be encouraged to publish a memoir as "I worried I did not know enough about my dad’s work, I was scared of making political statements of any kind, I was afraid of sounding like a whining spoiled brat." Unfortunately, this is exactly how I felt about this book. Said writes vapidly as a self-described "Upper West Side Princess," almost never touching on what being Palestinian means to her, spending her youth distancing herself from her Arabness and her adulthood embracing the Orientalist views of the Middle East her father strove to dispel. Worst, the book often conflates all Jews with Zionists, contains a wild amount of normalization of Israel, and perpetuates Islamophobia. Said not only positions herself as "not like other girls" but also as "one of the good Arabs." 

Describing being in Beirut when the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon started: "There's something I want to explain and I want to be clear about it. You can spend your life being a humanist, a pacifist, a thoughtful person who does not even think about hating or does not even know what it is to hate. That is to say you can really and truly be a human being who is tolerant and open-minded and humane, judging people by how they behave toward you, and treating them the way you wish to be treated. But when you are being attacked, when bombs are falling around you, planes are hovering over your head, when your life is in danger and you are scared, it is so easy to look up to the sky and feel abject boiling hatred for the people doing this to you and curse them out. When you are fearful for your life and you are being bombed by a certain group of people, you are not thinking, "Oh, but I know that not all Israelis agree with this." There's not time for that. Just as there is not time for them to think that it is not all Lebanese attacking back. And there is no time to think about the Israeli pilot who wishes he weren't in the plane dropping bombs on everybody. All you can think in these situations is "fuck everyone.'"

Thorough the memoir, Said continues to claim that she was connecting with her Arab roots at different points in her life, but then continues to distance herself from them: "It was relatively easy to avoid my Arabness in college, too. In part, it was because the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, so to anyone who wasn't actually from Palestine or Israel, the Israelis and Palestinians seems to be getting along fine. The war in Lebanon had ended and the country was being rebuilt. And I went to a school were political activity on campus was non-existent." It's true that Princeton is not known for it's political activity, but to ignore the work of the NAACP, LGBTQ+ groups, and others is a strange choice. The way Said describes herself, it sounded like she actively avoided any political organizations.

She also discussed "identity politics" in a strange tangent: "People are always shocked to know that my father wasn't a fan of this "identity politics PC-movement" of calling yourself "a Pacific Islander from the third island to the right of Samoa hyphen American." I guess it makes sense that someone who championed the rights and humanity of The Other would be a fan of declaring yourself an African-American or whatever. But he wasn't. And that makes sense, too. Daddy didn't like labels. Oriental was the one he was most famous for disliking, but it was just an example of millions of others."

Though the book is titled "Looking for Palestine," Said also spends time distancing her family from Palestine: "These were the people who saw him [Edward Said] as a human symbol of a geographical place. These people make me crazy, even though they mean well. It actually never occurred to us to bury Daddy in Palestine, because Palestine, though a cause he embraced wholeheartedly and fought for his entire adult life, is a place he hadn't really known. The world had conflated Edward Said with Palestine, but I had not. I had only really ever known Daddy. But how could I explain that to the world?"

In the end, the book is more about wealthy New York neighborhoods, Ivy League universities, and how great it is to vacation in Lebanon in the summer than it has anything to do with Palestine. Even in her final step towards learning about what it means to be Arab, interviewing Arabs in America with a group of Arab artists in the direct aftermath of 9/11, Said talks more about her Lebanese mother and her history than she does about her father or Palestinians. 

I wonder if she had written this now, seeing how much information she's been sharing on her Instagram about Gaza and about the mistreatment of Arabs in the USA, her framing would be different.