Sharon and My Mother-in-Law

Very unlike any other writing on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this memoir describes Palestinian architect 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, the challenges of shopping during curfew breaks, the trials of having her 92-year-old mother-in-law living in her house during a 42-day curfew, and thoughts on Israel's Separation Wall.--From publisher description.