First published 2001
Sarah Nour El-Din can't stop starting her life story. Each attempt at memoir becomes a fresh first chapter—abandoned, rewritten, never complete. Named after the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, she's a woman determined to capture her fractured existence: a life split between wartime Beirut and American exile, marked by family tragedy and fierce survival. As she wrestles with her own narrative, Sarah confronts the impossibilities of telling a linear life—her mother's suicide, her sister's mental illness, and her own resilient spirit emerge in fragmented, razor-sharp glimpses. Her story resists simple telling, instead offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of memory, identity, and the act of survival itself.
Genres: american-fiction, biographical-fiction, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: non-linear-narrative, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Beirut, America
Period: Wartime
316 pages · Paperback · W. W. Norton & Company
Content warnings: mental-illness, suicide