My memoir writing blends lived experience with reflection, turning moments of faith, motherhood, and transformation into stories of meaning. These works explore how personal narrative can preserve identity and illuminate resilience.
Work Seeking Publication
-
The Sad Apple Tree Bares Fruit Too
This memoir explores the interwoven legacies of maternal love, silence, and depression across generations. Beginning with childhood memories of fear and secrecy, it traces how the author’s mother’s struggles with shame and neglect shaped her own confrontation with sadness and the decision to seek help. Anchored in the tension between inheritance and transformation, the piece reflects on how memory can guide resilience, how naming a daughter becomes an act of reclamation, and how caring for oneself becomes both survival and legacy.
-
The Closet Light
In this memoir, the closet becomes both sanctuary and prison, a space defined by light and darkness. As a child, it offered refuge from the chaos of parental conflict, yet when the light was off it transformed into a site of terror, filled with imagined demons that mirrored the fear at home. Reflecting later in life, the closet seems insignificant, but in memory it reveals how childhood survival strategies were shaped by abuse, silence, and the fragile balance between safety and dread. Now, approaching her late thirties, the author considers how much of that fear was born from her parents’ relationship, and how the nightmares that remain are echoes of a past she continues to confront.
-
The Darkness Left Behind
This memoir reflects on a mother’s quiet descent into depression and a daughter’s inability to recognize it as a cry for help. Living in a loveless marriage, mocked and diminished by her husband, the mother withdrew from public life until even grocery trips became unbearable. As a child, the author could not understand why her mother failed to see her own worth and beauty. Years later, crushed by her own depression after becoming a parent, she confronts the echoes of that silence and resolves to break the cycle.
Unlike The Sad Apple Tree Bears Fruit Too, which centers on the author’s discovery of her mother’s depression through memory and its impact on her own struggle, this piece focuses on the mother’s lived experience of quiet self‑destruction and the daughter’s later recognition of its generational weight. Together, the two works form complementary explorations of maternal legacy—one through remembered childhood moments, the other through adult reflection and resolve.
Glass Boy
This work is a symbolic portrait of fragility, generosity, and hidden brokenness. The figure—a boy sculpted from glass, gems, and jade—stands in a traditional thobe with a Palestinian scarf, offering a golden heart in an oversized hand. At first glance, the body appears whole, but closer inspection reveals cracks and an ominous darkness within. His masked, clouded face suggests the erasure of identity, while his posture embodies both vulnerability and devotion.
Inspired by the artist’s son, Rachid, the piece reflects his unfailing generosity and tenderness, even as he struggles with feelings of worthlessness. The juxtaposition of precious materials with visible fractures conveys the paradox of human value: fragile yet immeasurable, easily overlooked yet profoundly luminous. The accompanying poem, Hidden Brokenness of the Glass Boy, deepens the metaphor, revealing how love and self‑sacrifice can coexist with hidden pain.
Cover and Called to the ER
This memoir recounts the quiet but transformative moment of conviction when the author first wore hijab. What began as a private decision became public in the charged atmosphere of an emergency room, where faith and family collided under fluorescent lights. Without announcement or permission, the act of covering became both a debut and a test—an assertion of identity in the midst of crisis. The piece explores themes of conviction, silence, and the tension between love and tradition, showing how faith often arrives not in perfect moments but in the interruptions of life.
My memoirs trace the fragile intersections of faith, family, and survival—stories of silence broken and resilience reclaimed. Together, they form a testament to how memory can illuminate both the shadows we inherit and the light we choose to carry forward.