"I learned about gender through shame. In so many ways, they became inseparable for me. As I grew older, people told me to stop being so feminine and grow up. Gender non-conformity is seen as something immature, something we have to grow out of to become adults. Overnight, so many of the things that I loved not only became associated with femininity but with shame... The thing about shame is that it eats at you until it fully consumes you. Then you cannot tell the difference between their shame and your own—between a body and an apology. It’s not just that you internalize the shame; rather, it becomes you."

Incredibly impactful. Vaid-Menon covered a lot of ground in such a short book, from their own story to the history of gender, the impact of gender norms in modern Western society to the history of gender variances in indigenous cultures, this is a great starting place and gave me even more motivation to continue reading about these topics.

"The world we want is one in which all people, regardless of their appearances, are treated with dignity and respect—one in which these factors do not have a bearing on safety, employment, and opportunity. We want a world that acknowledges and appreciates the complexity of everyone and everything—one in which transformation is celebrated and not repressed. We want a world where people have an underlying worth regardless of their gender. The gender binary is hurting us all, and it is time for us to finally put it to rest."

This was so much fun! There were a few points where I thought I knew where the plot was going and was confused at how much of the book was left, but no - I had no clue the twists this book would take. The characters were so interesting, and I loved the way the interpersonal relationships weren’t all magically perfect at the end, even though everyone grew so much.
The narration was also done so well. Highly recommend the audiobook!

TEARS


I’m going to need to read the ebook or a physical copy for more coherent thoughts, but let me take this moment to shout-out Hoopla for having immediately  available audiobook copies! Support your public library, they need our advocacy now more than ever.
 

The passionate call for true democracy spoke strongest to me from this work. Unfortunately, I do not have enough natural interest in economics for the rest to have really held my interest, though most of the analogies made me think.

A detailed and funny memoir about living with ME/CFS. I especially enjoyed the daydreams of mobile beds and magical apartments. The ending was abrupt, but somehow fit the vibe of the work.

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. 

Absolutely incredible work. It was horrifying to read about the cooperation of big tech with federal police and border control and then open the news to read about more and more detentions, deportations, and increasing surveillance systems. The writing was so gripping that I often found myself confused at what I had read in the news and what I was remembering from the book. Having also read Conditional Citizens by Lalami, I expected no less!
The biggest disappointment was how much the main character fixates on longing to vacation in Hawaii with no mention of how Indigenous Hawaiians have had their land stolen, resources depleted, and have spent decades asking tourists not to come and organizing against further land and resource theft with little outside support. Thankfully the character doesn’t go in the text, but it was out of place considering the other themes of the work.
This book will haunt me in the most useful ways, and I hope will inspire other readers to organize, oppose police states, and stand up against detention centers in their own lands.

Three stars is maybe generous, but I did enjoy some of the style and settings. However, there were a lot of unnecessary lectures on history and politics, and with how leftist and liberatory those info dumps were, the characters somehow came out praising cops, dismissing the fight for Puerto Rican independence, and propping up the systems they argue against.
Of course, if I was abandoned by my mother as a child for a cause, I can see how that child might grow up to despise the cause. But in that case, it felt like Olga should have either completely ignored the issues or been for some kind of becoming a US State compromise.
With her job, it would have been amazing to see her become a real Robin Hood, using her connections to take from the rich and give to the movement.

Instead, the tidy end of the book implies that revolutionary movements are only accomplished by hard-hearted but charismatic loners and the only way to find happiness is to turn off the news and reap the wealth of your “community” by becoming a landlord.

I’m not a big horror fan, but this was more fun than I thought it would be and I really enjoyed it! Using eugenics as the base of the horror was so interesting.
I wish there had been more tension between the two love interests, or that the romance wasn’t created there. She has so much chemistry, though toxic and abusive, with the brother, that the lack of spark made them feel like just  very good friends who survived a traumatic experience together.
Some of the language and phrases also felt too modern for the time period, which otherwise was very engrossing, but it didn’t take away from the readability too much.

This was beautiful and so, so heartbreaking. It follows the life of Wagadhaany, an Aboriginal Wiradjuri woman, and the ways the white colonizers abuse her, her community, and her land, and also how she maintains her culture, connections, and passes her traditions on to her children. Despite the heavy history and painful scenes, the writing was so touching and the characters so real I had a hard time pausing this read!