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"I thought about metal then, and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins. Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn't decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there, until I died, and long after."

It is a brilliant first novel documenting the breakdown and epiphany of a young, wealthy Palestinian woman living in New York. Not needing to work, she takes a job as a teacher, but she is ill-suited and unprepared and also doesn't care. She desperately needs to be clean and has an elaborate ritual using CVS products. She is obsessed with the feeling that she has an inside of herself that she cannot rid herself of, seemingly a metaphor for the persistence of the Palestinian people's pain.

There are aspects of the book that reminded me of other books where a woman has a breakdown. In Clarice Lispector's The Passion, According to GH, a woman accidentally smashes a cockroach in half, causing her breakdown where nothing much happens. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher has a breakdown and decides to give her students her prime, but it is anything but.

Favorite Passages:

Why is it that the rich are uptight but the poor are themselves?

He had just be-come a French citizen, he said, and his friends wanted to go to the Pride parade in Tel Aviv, but he was still hesitant. I told him I was Palestinian and had just become a citizen of Armenia. Some-times, maybe even most of the time, telling a stranger that you're Palestinian is a handicap, it makes people withdraw from you, it makes them unsure or suspicious. But other times it's like show-ing a hand of four aces. You get a pat on the back, you get Yasser Arafat's V sign, you get free stuff. And that day, when I told him, Mubarak sold me a size 35 Birkin in crocodile skin, the color of ganache. Happy Pride, Vive la Palestine, Eid Mubarak.

I walked back to the hotel, and I wondered if it was true, what I had told him, that I didn't need to pretend. Maybe pretense Was all there was. Fashion is pretense, education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense. I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned.

I read the poem again, it said something about me, about what kind of person I was, what kind of teacher I wanted to be for my students. That poem, with all its references to art, was meant to be a vacation from their burdens. There was a moment, before, when I was carefree, when I offered my students lightness. As Frank O'Hara wrote, It seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience.

Aisha belonged to that rare breed of people, kind and gentle people, I think they are born that way. They're more visible in cer., tain professions, in education, or in health care, like the nurses who draw blood. These people often work indoors, they work long, intensive hours, sometimes night shifts. There aren't many of them these days, because our culture socializes us against kindness. I know this because you rarely come across them in the street.

Rich Palestinians, she told me, rolling her eyes, in New York of all places, the world capital of support for Israel. I agreed with her, I said, The more contradictions in your life, the more complex your identity, the harder your soul, the more difficult it is to love and be loved. I don't want to be with similar people, I continued, if you rub many knotted strings together, they don't solve into a beautiful braid, they just become a big ugly mess.

I was unfamiliar witn. I come from a land that is a graveyard. For millennia, all kinds of people were born there, they died there, or were killed, and some were even resurrected or reborn. It was bloody, haunted, and doomed, but it belonged to mankind. Nature in America Was uncivilized and untamed. I didn't know how to read it. If a deer was some kind of warning sign, I wouldn't have known.

I loved my friend's house but I knew that it was haunted. Even at a young age, I knew that there was a family out there in the world that was still holding on to the key.
No, I didn't know this intuitively. Each time my morn picked me up from the house she made a remark about it. Of course, the door had long been changed, it was a modern glass door with a keyhole fitting a small aluminum key, which my friend kept on a friendship bracelet. I remember that above the door they had garlic cloves hanging. My friend told me that it was there to ward off vampires, but I think, in truth, that it was to keep the spirit of the original inhabitants away.

Of course, nothing had happened, it had barely been a few weeks. I dug it out, the will was pretty much intact. The Birkin was soiled, I had ruined it, but the hardware was still shiny. I thought about metal then, and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins. Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn't decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there, until I died, and long after.