Rabih Alameddine
Author of An Unnecessary Woman
About the Author
He is a writer & artist living in San Francisco. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Koolaids: The Art of War & The Perv. (Bowker Author Biography)
Image credit: Elena Siebert
Works by Rabih Alameddine
Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art (Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Lectures) (2024) 11 copies, 1 review
Εγώ, η θεά 1 copy
El otro lado del telescopio 1 copy
Associated Works
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (2010) — Contributor — 1,111 copies, 27 reviews
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases (2020) — Contributor — 261 copies, 5 reviews
Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction (2004) — Contributor, some editions — 27 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1959
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of California, Los Angeles
- Occupations
- writer
painter - Awards and honors
- Guggenheim Fellowship
John Dos Passos Prize (2019)
Lambda Literary Award (Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, 2026) - Nationality
- Lebanon
USA - Birthplace
- Amman, Jordan
- Places of residence
- Kuwait
Lebanon
California, USA
England, UK
Jordan
Members
Discussions
Focus on: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine in Book Focus (April 2022)
Reviews
One of the best books I've ever read: a Borges-esque take on AIDS, Lebanese-Americans, and gay identities. A series of vignettes told from a variety of voices; time and location fold on themselves, and I am left wondering who is speaking and realizing, somewhat ironically, that it doesn't matter. Humorous in its serious understanding of futility and hope and death and longing. Up there with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude and David Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering show more Genius as one of my favorite works. show less
Real Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: From National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction comes a tragicomic love story set in Lebanon, a modern saga of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother
In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, show more his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned.
When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.
Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities—a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: One thing the gay youngest child learns early and often: "tag, you're it!" never ends. End-of-life care for difficult parent? "Tag, you're it!" It comes to us all.
And don't our siblings just love it. Our parents, well, it's complicated...and it never really uncomplicates. Raja grows up gay in a country whose religious majority strongly discourage public gayness. That right there's a novel's worth of coming of age, coning out, coming to terms with the world as it is. And what do you know! That IS most of the novel...just not in real time. Raja and Zalfa (his mom) interact as a function of their shared history. (Note to closeted boys: your mother knows. Your dad's more iffy, but your mother knows.) Their zingers and barbs all relate to the devastation of Lebanon, the loss of functioning civil society, and the endlessness of sneaking and hiding that gay lads insist is necessary when it mostly isn't. At home, anyway.
Since Zalfa is such a force of nature and since he's made responsible for her care in his tiny home, Raja thinks running away from that home sounds wonderful. (Never mind it's his own home.) As a novelist manqué, he never expected to get an offer from a writing program for a residency, still less one that will take him to the US...pretty damn far from Beirut. Bliss!
You clever readers! You already know that dodge absolutely never works. What happens in the US is best described as "madcap." If one were to write a gay version of Topper, with a seriously bossy mother in place of wife, and make the ghosts more numerous, it would be this story. (Side note to the Hollywood story editors who haunt my blog (snort): Buy this book! I have some casting ideas, too!)
What caused him to run away is what causes most gay sons to run away. His mother, who loves him and whom he loves, is the emotional center of his world. There is no room to expand, to rummage, to poke into the dark corners and see what's there, at the center of the family circle. Leaving Mother is a rite of passage that never gets skipped in a healthy life. Or even a complicated, eventful, not-always-happy one that only tangentially flirts with mental health.
Author Alameddine is a perennial favorite of mine. We're the same age, we're both literature and book lovers, we've seen a world utterly, completely up stakes and shift away from what we'd thought were Eternal Verities. I feel...at ease...reading his work because I recognize the assumptions, I get the emotional valences, and I like being there. I enjoyed the experience I had coming to the table with Zalfa and Raja, sitting down to listen to their conversation, and learning from each one's actions exactly how much they really love each other.
If I have a cavil with The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), it's that the nature of a novel of the memory, the inevitability of flashback in its use, tends to decrease the impact of the events so recalled. In this story's structure, there are not multiple timelines; there are memories recalled. In both of those use cases, as the timelines are each about Raja and Zalfa, I know for sure that I'm not here to find out what happens but how what happened felt. And feels.
It is a minor thing, but a real one. I'm hearty in my recommendation to get yourself to Beirut via Author Alameddine's memory palace. It is a very nice place to spend a day reading and thinking and laughing. show less
The Publisher Says: From National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction comes a tragicomic love story set in Lebanon, a modern saga of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother
In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, show more his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned.
When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.
Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities—a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: One thing the gay youngest child learns early and often: "tag, you're it!" never ends. End-of-life care for difficult parent? "Tag, you're it!" It comes to us all.
And don't our siblings just love it. Our parents, well, it's complicated...and it never really uncomplicates. Raja grows up gay in a country whose religious majority strongly discourage public gayness. That right there's a novel's worth of coming of age, coning out, coming to terms with the world as it is. And what do you know! That IS most of the novel...just not in real time. Raja and Zalfa (his mom) interact as a function of their shared history. (Note to closeted boys: your mother knows. Your dad's more iffy, but your mother knows.) Their zingers and barbs all relate to the devastation of Lebanon, the loss of functioning civil society, and the endlessness of sneaking and hiding that gay lads insist is necessary when it mostly isn't. At home, anyway.
Since Zalfa is such a force of nature and since he's made responsible for her care in his tiny home, Raja thinks running away from that home sounds wonderful. (Never mind it's his own home.) As a novelist manqué, he never expected to get an offer from a writing program for a residency, still less one that will take him to the US...pretty damn far from Beirut. Bliss!
You clever readers! You already know that dodge absolutely never works. What happens in the US is best described as "madcap." If one were to write a gay version of Topper, with a seriously bossy mother in place of wife, and make the ghosts more numerous, it would be this story. (Side note to the Hollywood story editors who haunt my blog (snort): Buy this book! I have some casting ideas, too!)
What caused him to run away is what causes most gay sons to run away. His mother, who loves him and whom he loves, is the emotional center of his world. There is no room to expand, to rummage, to poke into the dark corners and see what's there, at the center of the family circle. Leaving Mother is a rite of passage that never gets skipped in a healthy life. Or even a complicated, eventful, not-always-happy one that only tangentially flirts with mental health.
Author Alameddine is a perennial favorite of mine. We're the same age, we're both literature and book lovers, we've seen a world utterly, completely up stakes and shift away from what we'd thought were Eternal Verities. I feel...at ease...reading his work because I recognize the assumptions, I get the emotional valences, and I like being there. I enjoyed the experience I had coming to the table with Zalfa and Raja, sitting down to listen to their conversation, and learning from each one's actions exactly how much they really love each other.
If I have a cavil with The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), it's that the nature of a novel of the memory, the inevitability of flashback in its use, tends to decrease the impact of the events so recalled. In this story's structure, there are not multiple timelines; there are memories recalled. In both of those use cases, as the timelines are each about Raja and Zalfa, I know for sure that I'm not here to find out what happens but how what happened felt. And feels.
It is a minor thing, but a real one. I'm hearty in my recommendation to get yourself to Beirut via Author Alameddine's memory palace. It is a very nice place to spend a day reading and thinking and laughing. show less
Rating: 5* of five (but watch this space...)
I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: When you are faced with an overwhelming event...say, the Syrian refugee crisis of 2016...which is, in itself, the result of a series of overwhelming events outside the control of any individual who is suffering the consequences of others' bad decisions...where do you even begin to process the emotional and psychic overwhelm of the event?
In Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of show more the Telescope, you begin by finding the voice you need to make alienation, victimization, and the abjection of fleeing everything you've ever known against your will, truly personal. Enter Mina Simpson. She is a trans woman in a lesbian relationship (one thing I found ever-so-slightly on the nose was setting a lesbian's tale on Lesbos...but that's where it happened in reality) with a Haitian psychologist, and fellow Chicagoan, Francine. She is a physician summoned to help with the overwhelming floods of refugees from Syria's dissolution by her friend and fellow transwoman (but heterosexual), Emma. Also a doctor, Emma cries for help that Mina arrives to offer exactly as the Holidays result in a vast sea of wealthy-Westerner disaster tourists showing up to "do their bit" to help...Them.
Mina's life as a trans person in Lebanon was harrowing, as I expect most trans people's live are everywhere. There is so much hate directed at trans people all over the world, from every imaginable quarter, that it was a genuine pleasure to see Mina's older brother and sole remaining family member was loving, accepting, and even if not capable of going against the Will of the Family in public, honestly supportive of Mina as her real self. What it has done *for* her, however, is made her adept at navigating the undercurrents of family life. Mina's actions relating to Sumaiya, one of "Them" and possessor of a powerful will in a dying body, prove that Mina is a woman of the most beautifully tender spirit, capable of understanding that love for another can not conquer all and does not confer metaphysical or physical superpowers...but does summon forth reserves of strength that inspire awe in her, and in me.
The story isn't always obvious. I mean by that the presence of the author, Alameddine, on the page is second-person and the main character, our narrator, is addressing him. (He includes a very amusing, exaggerated self-caricature at 12% in the Kindle file that does not give him near enough credit for being so delightful a persona.) The pattern of addressing "you" in MSS is one I am generally not in favor of...I've gotten out of bed, dressed myself, and driven to a charity-box run by people I dislike to deposit a book told in second person so I wouldn't ever run across it again...but done as Author Alameddine does it here, makes me feel included, a part of a larger story. That alone would merit all five stars!
There are many other reasons I loved this read as immoderately as I did. The Lesbian setting makes the fact that this refugee crisis isn't the first in the area, bringing up events that not that many of his readers will know about like the Anatolian expulsion of the millennia-old Greek population and the tragedy of Smyrna, both in 1922 at the birth of modern Turkey. The 2016 refugee crisis, likewise a manufactured event meant to hurt vulnerable people, and similarly is still ramifying through European society (goddesses please bless the departed Chancellor Merkel for her willingness to commit to rehoming a million Syrians in Germany, however self-serving it was in light of their collapsed birth rate), though not always to Europe's credit, is powerfully involving. But they did *something* and we, in the USA, did bugger-all. Like we're doing for the Afghans we abandoned. Like we did for the Kurds we abandoned.
But I digress. And disagreeably.
Author Alameddine's Lebanese queerness allowed him to be Mina in more ways than another writer could. This results in a series of beautiful insights:
Tinges of violet...the Minotaur, who ate both boys and girls equally, whose one weakness the ineffable Theseus found by penetrating his labyrinth...the despair of a rigid father setting his son a path in life and imagining that, despite the boy's strength and his quick wits, that he has failed to achieve the father's goals for him...the clouds of obfuscation, the sense of the Present being a fog-bank and only the keenest senses can suss out the proper course (whether it be towards or away from some obstacle). And more, given that this is a moment that Mina's just arrived and is in her car, trying to navigate while overwhelmed by the vastness of clouds obscuring her path to be of service...I could go on, but why? You'll read it, you'll find your own reasons to love the words on these pages.
Mina's marriage to Francine, which she dates to thirty years before the book's events...January 9, 1986, to be precise...began when, as Mina says, she saw Francine "...{dancing} as if she was exploring her body in space." Anyone, anyone who could inspire such a sentence is a worthy object of love as well as partner in commitment! And to make Mina, the awkward and the marginal, the object of reciprocal love and attention, was a stroke of genius. How many of us have the experience of marrying in accordance with Iris Murdoch's deathless marriage (and writing) aperçu: "One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."
Possibly the wickedest moment of the book is the ending, where the story of how the story came to be told is told at last: The question posed by psychiatrist Francine to the writer (whose "...default state of being" is whining), in her comfortable Chicago apartment:
And this, more than anything else Author Alameddine wrote in this beautiful work, stopped me in my tracks. Like the people in the scene, I bolted upright. Isn't this what we who read voraciously have always claimed Literature does? Allows its devotees to live a million lives, not just focus on one (probably tedious and humdrum) little existence? I like to think it can, and does, and clearly so does Author Alameddine.
But I caution the gentleman against pursuing the Frankenstein retelling he posits...Ahmed Saadawi already staked that corner out, don't you know. (That whole scene of writerly angst and desperation was slapstick funny, and made me chortle chuckle and guffaw...thanks!)
What I'm getting at here is a simple thing: I gave this book five stars, and I think it could get the annual nod of "six stars of five," barring something else this amazing coming across my field of vision. That means, in case I'm not quite making myself clear, that I think this book belongs on your shelf, reading device, or library holds list, wherever you triage the must-read-nows of your literary life. It is profound, profoundly beautiful, and fearless in its ambitious scope and craftsmanship.
I wait for this experience every time I open a book. It is a thrill to get it. show less
I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: When you are faced with an overwhelming event...say, the Syrian refugee crisis of 2016...which is, in itself, the result of a series of overwhelming events outside the control of any individual who is suffering the consequences of others' bad decisions...where do you even begin to process the emotional and psychic overwhelm of the event?
In Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of show more the Telescope, you begin by finding the voice you need to make alienation, victimization, and the abjection of fleeing everything you've ever known against your will, truly personal. Enter Mina Simpson. She is a trans woman in a lesbian relationship (one thing I found ever-so-slightly on the nose was setting a lesbian's tale on Lesbos...but that's where it happened in reality) with a Haitian psychologist, and fellow Chicagoan, Francine. She is a physician summoned to help with the overwhelming floods of refugees from Syria's dissolution by her friend and fellow transwoman (but heterosexual), Emma. Also a doctor, Emma cries for help that Mina arrives to offer exactly as the Holidays result in a vast sea of wealthy-Westerner disaster tourists showing up to "do their bit" to help...Them.
Mina's life as a trans person in Lebanon was harrowing, as I expect most trans people's live are everywhere. There is so much hate directed at trans people all over the world, from every imaginable quarter, that it was a genuine pleasure to see Mina's older brother and sole remaining family member was loving, accepting, and even if not capable of going against the Will of the Family in public, honestly supportive of Mina as her real self. What it has done *for* her, however, is made her adept at navigating the undercurrents of family life. Mina's actions relating to Sumaiya, one of "Them" and possessor of a powerful will in a dying body, prove that Mina is a woman of the most beautifully tender spirit, capable of understanding that love for another can not conquer all and does not confer metaphysical or physical superpowers...but does summon forth reserves of strength that inspire awe in her, and in me.
The story isn't always obvious. I mean by that the presence of the author, Alameddine, on the page is second-person and the main character, our narrator, is addressing him. (He includes a very amusing, exaggerated self-caricature at 12% in the Kindle file that does not give him near enough credit for being so delightful a persona.) The pattern of addressing "you" in MSS is one I am generally not in favor of...I've gotten out of bed, dressed myself, and driven to a charity-box run by people I dislike to deposit a book told in second person so I wouldn't ever run across it again...but done as Author Alameddine does it here, makes me feel included, a part of a larger story. That alone would merit all five stars!
There are many other reasons I loved this read as immoderately as I did. The Lesbian setting makes the fact that this refugee crisis isn't the first in the area, bringing up events that not that many of his readers will know about like the Anatolian expulsion of the millennia-old Greek population and the tragedy of Smyrna, both in 1922 at the birth of modern Turkey. The 2016 refugee crisis, likewise a manufactured event meant to hurt vulnerable people, and similarly is still ramifying through European society (goddesses please bless the departed Chancellor Merkel for her willingness to commit to rehoming a million Syrians in Germany, however self-serving it was in light of their collapsed birth rate), though not always to Europe's credit, is powerfully involving. But they did *something* and we, in the USA, did bugger-all. Like we're doing for the Afghans we abandoned. Like we did for the Kurds we abandoned.
But I digress. And disagreeably.
Author Alameddine's Lebanese queerness allowed him to be Mina in more ways than another writer could. This results in a series of beautiful insights:
...the aforementioned Mediterranean, yes, glorious. Or was this the Aegean, which Aegeus threw himself into when he thought his son Theseus had failed against the Minotaur? The clouds were such that both the asphalt and the water had the same color, a bluish slate, the color of oxidization on copper with a tinge of periwinkle violet.
Tinges of violet...the Minotaur, who ate both boys and girls equally, whose one weakness the ineffable Theseus found by penetrating his labyrinth...the despair of a rigid father setting his son a path in life and imagining that, despite the boy's strength and his quick wits, that he has failed to achieve the father's goals for him...the clouds of obfuscation, the sense of the Present being a fog-bank and only the keenest senses can suss out the proper course (whether it be towards or away from some obstacle). And more, given that this is a moment that Mina's just arrived and is in her car, trying to navigate while overwhelmed by the vastness of clouds obscuring her path to be of service...I could go on, but why? You'll read it, you'll find your own reasons to love the words on these pages.
Mina's marriage to Francine, which she dates to thirty years before the book's events...January 9, 1986, to be precise...began when, as Mina says, she saw Francine "...{dancing} as if she was exploring her body in space." Anyone, anyone who could inspire such a sentence is a worthy object of love as well as partner in commitment! And to make Mina, the awkward and the marginal, the object of reciprocal love and attention, was a stroke of genius. How many of us have the experience of marrying in accordance with Iris Murdoch's deathless marriage (and writing) aperçu: "One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."
Possibly the wickedest moment of the book is the ending, where the story of how the story came to be told is told at last: The question posed by psychiatrist Francine to the writer (whose "...default state of being" is whining), in her comfortable Chicago apartment:
"Have you considered writing about an American couple in suburbia to help the Syrian refugees? If you did a good job, Syrian refugees would be able to inhabit the skin of Americans, walk in their Cole Haans, empathize with their boredom and angst."
And this, more than anything else Author Alameddine wrote in this beautiful work, stopped me in my tracks. Like the people in the scene, I bolted upright. Isn't this what we who read voraciously have always claimed Literature does? Allows its devotees to live a million lives, not just focus on one (probably tedious and humdrum) little existence? I like to think it can, and does, and clearly so does Author Alameddine.
But I caution the gentleman against pursuing the Frankenstein retelling he posits...Ahmed Saadawi already staked that corner out, don't you know. (That whole scene of writerly angst and desperation was slapstick funny, and made me chortle chuckle and guffaw...thanks!)
What I'm getting at here is a simple thing: I gave this book five stars, and I think it could get the annual nod of "six stars of five," barring something else this amazing coming across my field of vision. That means, in case I'm not quite making myself clear, that I think this book belongs on your shelf, reading device, or library holds list, wherever you triage the must-read-nows of your literary life. It is profound, profoundly beautiful, and fearless in its ambitious scope and craftsmanship.
I wait for this experience every time I open a book. It is a thrill to get it. show less
Quiet book about an introverted woman that translates books into Arabic as her life’s work. Almost as if talking to herself, the protagonist, Aaliya, examines her life and what she sees as its limited value. She is divorced, childless, and estranged from family. This book examines the rather esoteric question of what makes a person necessary or unnecessary? What makes life worthwhile?
It is filled with literary, art, and musical references, philosophical musings, and observations on the show more nature of aging. It vividly portrays with what life was like in Beirut, Lebanon, during multiple civil wars, conflicts with neighboring countries, and the resulting tensions in everyday life. It is an homage to the power of the written word to influence lives.
Aaliya is a complex character with a dry sense of humor and strong opinions. She has always been different and sees herself as an outsider. I was somewhat surprised to find this book was written by a man. He has captured the voice of this seventy-two-year-old woman brilliantly.
This book is most definitely not for everyone. It is introspective, very slow throughout, with not much in the way of plot or action. Parts are extremely depressing. The main character meanders off on tangents regularly. It contains no chapters for this weighty material and could have benefitted from inserting natural chapter breaks for the reader to pause and ponder.
I have made visible several of my highlighted passages from this book to give readers a better idea of the content. Recommended to those interested in Literature with a capital “L” or those that enjoy introspection about the meaning of life. I didn’t particularly enjoy the reading experience, but I appreciated this book for the language, depth of characterization, and uniqueness. show less
It is filled with literary, art, and musical references, philosophical musings, and observations on the show more nature of aging. It vividly portrays with what life was like in Beirut, Lebanon, during multiple civil wars, conflicts with neighboring countries, and the resulting tensions in everyday life. It is an homage to the power of the written word to influence lives.
Aaliya is a complex character with a dry sense of humor and strong opinions. She has always been different and sees herself as an outsider. I was somewhat surprised to find this book was written by a man. He has captured the voice of this seventy-two-year-old woman brilliantly.
This book is most definitely not for everyone. It is introspective, very slow throughout, with not much in the way of plot or action. Parts are extremely depressing. The main character meanders off on tangents regularly. It contains no chapters for this weighty material and could have benefitted from inserting natural chapter breaks for the reader to pause and ponder.
I have made visible several of my highlighted passages from this book to give readers a better idea of the content. Recommended to those interested in Literature with a capital “L” or those that enjoy introspection about the meaning of life. I didn’t particularly enjoy the reading experience, but I appreciated this book for the language, depth of characterization, and uniqueness. show less
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