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Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries
Suad Amiry
Irreverent, darkly funny, unexpected, and very unlike any other writing on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law describes Palestinian architect Suad Amiry?s experience of living in the Occupied Territories.
Pantheon
October 2005
224 pages ISBN: 0375423796 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
"Perhaps one day I may forgive you for putting
us under curfew for forty-two days, but I will never
forgive you for making us live with my mother-
in-law for what seemed, then, more like
forty-two years." Irreverent, darkly funny, unexpected, and very unlike any
other writing on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Sharon
and My Mother-in-Law describes Palestinian architect Suad
Amiry’s experience of living in the Occupied Territories. Based on diaries and e-mail correspondence that Amiry kept
to maintain her sanity from 1981 to 2004, the book evokes,
through a series of vignettes, the frustrations, cabin
fever, and downright misery of daily life in the West Bank
town of Ramallah, with its curfews, roadblocks, house-to-
house searches, and violence. Amiry writes about the
enormous difficulty of moving from one place to another,
the torture of falling in love with someone from another
town, the absurdity of her dog receiving a Jerusalem
identity card when thousands of Palestinians could not do
so, and the impossibility of acquiring a gas mask from the
Israeli Civil Administration during the first Gulf War in
1991. There are also the challenges of shopping during
curfew breaks, the trials of having her ninety-two-year-old
mother-in-law living in her house during a forty-two-day
curfew, and thoughts on Israel’s Separation Wall. With a wickedly sharp ear for dialogue and a keen eye for
the most telling details, Amiry gives us an original,
ironic, and firsthand glimpse into the absurdity--and agony-
-of life in the Occupied Territories.
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