Review by Booklist Review
Aziza is at war with her own body. In morbid dread of fleshiness, grease, and fragrance, she has become addicted to hunger. While undergoing treatment for anorexia she reflects on her family history, especially her earthy, indomitable Palestinian grandmother Horea, a survivor of the Palestinian Nakba. Unlike Horea's timid son, who tries desperately (and ineptly) to blend into white America, Horea invades Sarah's decorous suburban childhood with tastes and odors of a vibrant yet alien culture. Horea is judged and mocked by Sarah's school friends and their parents, and Sarah internalizes their disgust. Eventually, Aziza writes, "I began to fear her fatness." Rejecting Horea means rejecting Aziza's past, her Palestinian identity, even her sexuality, for all are dangerous. While her father disappears through cultural assimilation, Aziza seeks erasure in starvation, and begins "chasing hunger over strength." Only by rediscovering her power as a Palestinian woman--in a body "rooted in bulk, solidity, girth. A body asked to be heavy, to anchor a shattered nation with her fortitude"--will Aziza, perhaps, be able to survive. A beautiful and sobering memoir.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Battling illness while excavating her family's traumatic past. In 2019, Palestinian American writer Aziza checked herself into a psychiatric ward in New York City in order to address a case of anorexia so severe that, at intake, her doctor told her that she was lucky to be alive. After successfully completing the treatment, she entered an outpatient program where she relapsed, months before the pandemic began. In the claustrophobia of lockdown, she felt trapped and panicked, depending on her husband for a level of support she struggled to accept. "I see myself anchored in my body," she writes. "Locked inside a life I want to love but cannot understand." Although quarantine made recovery feel impossible, it also gave Aziza time to explore her complex relationship with her deceased Palestinian grandmother, whom she called Sittoo, and the Gazan homeland that Sittoo was forced to flee long before the author was born. Between her childhood diaries, her father's memories of his mother, her own memories of traveling and working in Palestine, and a short foray into psilocybin-aided therapy, Aziza pieces together the ancestral trauma that, combined with her gender, forms the psychological basis of her eating disorder. Lyrical, vulnerable, and insightful, this formally inventive, deeply researched memoir masterfully weaves the author's struggle with anorexia with the history of her family and their multigenerational relationship with their Palestinian homeland. The author's description of her relationship with her husband is particularly poignant in its honesty and circumspection, providing a devastating picture of what it means to be sick around those we love. A graceful memoir about anorexia, family, and displacement. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
