Abstract
Arab-Canadian writer and journalist Kamal Al-Solaylee, a gay man who grew up in one of the wealthiest families in Yemen, delivers a courageous, brutally honest, engaging and often funny memoir of family life over six decades. While he was enjoying the cultural and personal freedoms of life in the West in the 1980s, his once-liberal family fell slowly in with hard-line interpretations of Islam that were sweeping the Arab world at that time. Al-Solaylee pens a part memoir of an Arab family caught in the turmoil of politics, part coming out narrative and cultural analysis of the modern Middle East that we think we know so much about.