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Love Is an Ex-Country

  • Book
  • Feb 2, 2021
  • #Memoir #LGBTQ+
Randa Jarrar
@randajarrar
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
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3.66/5 730 ratings
1 Recommender
1 Mention
1 Collection
Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this provocative memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an... Show More

Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this provocative memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America.

Randa Jarrar is a fearless voice of dissent who has been called “politically incorrect” (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times). As an American raised for a time in Egypt, and finding herself captivated by the story of a celebrated Egyptian belly dancer’s journey across the United States in the 1940s, she sets off from her home in California to her parents’ in Connecticut.

Coloring this road trip are journeys abroad and recollections of a life lived with daring. Reclaiming her autonomy after a life of survival—domestic assault as a child, and later, as a wife; threats and doxxing after her viral tweet about Barbara Bush—Jarrar offers a bold look at domestic violence, single motherhood, and sexuality through the lens of the punished-yet-triumphant body. On the way, she schools a rest-stop racist, destroys Confederate flags in the desert, and visits the Chicago neighborhood where her immigrant parents first lived.

Hailed as “one of the finest writers of her generation” (Laila Lalami), Jarrar delivers a euphoric and critical, funny and profound memoir that will speak to anyone who has felt erased, asserting: I am here. I am joyful.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 240

ISBN: 1948226588

ISBN-13: 9781948226585

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Isabelle Popp @isabellepoppHEA · May 24, 2022
  • Curated in 20 MUST-READ ROAD TRIP BOOKS
Among nonfiction road trip books, Love Is an Ex-Country is vital for showing how travel in the United States functions very differently depending on what you look like. Jarrar is a fat, queer, Muslim, Arab American who recounts her trip from California to Connecticut in 2016. She encounters hostility, but as a victim of abuse as well as online threats against her life, she knows well how survival mode functions. It’s a brazen book that doles out plentiful laughs along with copious tears.
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