Love Is an Ex-Country

By: Randa Jarrar

Narrated by: Randa Jarrar

Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2021 Randa Jarrar (P)2021 Random House Audio

painfully beautiful

Listening to Randa Jarrar was like having her in my kitchen over a cup of coffee (or a glass of wine). This is a painfully beautiful memoir, in which Jarrar talks about the most personal experiences in her life, while making connections to wider political issues. Everything in Jarrar's memoir becomes political: from BDSM to giving birth to her son.
She touches on so many issues, and makes connections between them.

Jarrar talks openly about her body and how she is perceived as a queer, brown, fat woman, and so much more, making intricate connections between the personal and the political. This is intersectionality at its best. Jarrar's fragility and resilience touched me on so many levels.

Some of the other issues she talks about: how she received death threats following a tweet following the death of Barbara Bush, in which she called her an amazing racist.

The fact that BDSM is the most safe sex environment for women, while in vanilla, heterosexual sex women are the most exposed to violence and are the least safe.

The abuse and violence she experienced at the hand of her father. How she felt that all her father wanted was for her to shrink. The complex relationship with both her father and her mother.

She talks about her visit to Palestine and how she was eventually deported back to the US, after hours of interrogation at the Ben Gurion Airport.

I loved this book. I felt Randa's pain in my own body, and at the same time her resilience and celebration of herself, her body, and her life.

Randa Jarrar is a queer writer of Palestinian and Egyptian heritage. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in intersectional feminism and queer writing of people of color.

I wanted to like it.

I really wanted to like this book because I relate to Jarrar's politics and her identity as a queer Arab in diaspora. But this book is written strangely. Why intertwine a chapter about how she likes when a man enjoys her breasts with an upsetting story of her child sexual abuse? Why compare Tinkerbell and Thumbalina to vulvas? Why say that an oil sheen represented the forthcoming Gulf War? And the way she reads each chapter like a romantic, floaty poem is very annoying.