Living With Fracture: A Conversation With Sarah Aziza

SA: I mentioned being dismantled as a human being after I spent four months in that institution, and it was a really punitive carceral experience where we were just controlled. This psycho-medical industrial model just compounded what I’d always heard in the West, which is not just anorexia, but depression, anxiety, all of these things that so many people suffer from, are apolitical and individual. So I was told many times that I had no reason to be so sick, and I really took that to heart—that I’m just crazy, and it’s a very unhelpful framework and also very untrue.

I always felt crazy for being told that I should be well in the world that we live in; there’s so much that’s sick about our current society, and I was a very politically minded person. I was an activist, but I didn’t give myself permission to create political connections with my eating disorder. There’s a lot of shame involved too, which lends itself to self-blame. The book’s structure is very unorthodox because I started to see how multiple temporalities and geographies are present simultaneously.

We don’t have to be genetic scientists to sense the fact that our history and our family’s history are embedded in the everyday. I just started to see echoes and eventually gave myself more and more permission to trust those echoes and continue to uncover very uncanny parallels between my grandmother, my father, and my own life that eventually just made it feel inevitable to me that I would expand the lens of this illness into something much more psychosocial and political.

It’s very hard to be a Palestinian and be well in the middle of a genocide. It’s very hard to be a person of conscience and be well. It’s a malignant system that we live in, and trying to be well is a communal project. We must focus on dismantling the things that are refusing health for so many of us.

LNW: In your book, you make stylistic choices that defy genre and convention. At times, you sprinkle untranslated Arabic words or phrases into the text. Elsewhere you censor the pet name that your husband calls you or refer to people only by the first initial of their name. What is the significance of these omissions? How do they challenge expectations in memoir writing and in Western literature more broadly?

SA: I thought a lot about opacity and legibility while writing this book. As someone who’s Palestinian but the daughter of a Palestinian father who modeled assimilation as someone who could be white-passing, as someone who speaks English as their first language, I only knew how to exist in the world as someone who was a code switcher, shapeshifter, always trying to accommodate the American Anglophone reader or context that I was in. I disappeared inside of a lot of those concessions. I knew somewhat who I was, but that was secondary to accommodating the context in which I found myself. In this book, I tried to come closer to reflecting reality as I experienced it. It is very hybrid and multilingual and contains privacies that I decided to maintain for myself.

In memoirs—especially those written by non-white women or in the recovery genre—there’s often a voyeuristic expectation that you’re just gonna dump everything on the page and that readers deserve access to everything. I wanted to challenge the reader in multiple ways, in one way, reminding them that I am not just bearing my unedited and uncrafted experiences, but I’m making choices because this book is conceptual. I block out certain things to remind the reader, “Hey, I made a choice, and this is private.” Or “Hey, the best way to express this is in Arabic.” It’s a good reminder that people who speak a different mother tongue are always editing, translating, and making themselves legible. If you’re reading this book in the United States or Canada, which are the two countries it’s released in right now, you’re probably being accommodated to all the time. So maybe that’s a moment of an examination for an Anglophone reader. And for Arabic readers, it’s a reminder that they’re actually being thought of as my first audience.

LNW: Your book is deeply researched—footnotes ground the reader in facts about eating disorders and Palestinian history. But what struck me most was your command of your family history, which is depicted with such vivid detail. How did you go about documenting your family’s past? Did you consult archives? I know you spoke with your father about your grandmother’s life, but how did you so evocatively recover memories that he was not even alive to witness?

SA: I was trained as a journalist, so I initially thought the only material I could work with was what I could literally footnote or extract from the archive. But the truth is bigger than the facts. There are things that are true, that are not documented as fact. Facts are authorized, often by powers that don’t prioritize lives like my grandmother, who’s a disabled woman from Gaza.

So, my book was a collection of oral histories. It was an examination and an exhaustion. I exhausted the archive, but then I took a step further. The theorist Saidiya Hartman gives us this concept of critical fabulation, which is imagining with and into the silences of the archive. I think there’s a way of honoring and getting closer to certain truths that involve narrative. So I triangulated some of the scenes and stories where I talked to every relative who was alive for it. I did as much due diligence as possible, reading into every detail of that time and place I could find. And then, as a writer, I stepped into it, following in the footsteps of other nonfiction writers I admire. I call it speculative nonfiction.

LNW: Did you conduct those interviews with your family in person, or was it over software like Zoom? What was your favored method?

SA: I used many different methods. I went to Jordan to see my uncle and cousins at one point. A lot of Zoom, a lot of WhatsApp voice notes—everything I could find. My father thought he didn’t remember certain things, and then it turns out he had repressed certain memories. I tried proceeding with caution as a non-therapist—not trying to drag up things bluntly, but, instead, very delicately. I would wake up sometimes to voice notes from relatives or my father when something just reemerged from their unconscious.

LNW: You cut your teeth doing journalistic writing—covering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Trump administration, local news even. What is it about this present moment that has prompted you to turn to more personal essays and memoir writing?

SA: I spent the first few years of my journalism career sort of with a bit of a muzzle on. I feel like I was trying to behave well. I didn’t want to burn any bridges. I didn’t want to out myself as being too leftist, too Palestinian, too angry, too Muslim.… And I think that bought me some time, bought me some bylines, but personally, it felt very suffocating.

I’ve always been very reluctant to write about myself, which may be hard to believe because I wrote this fat book where I’m the main character. But, I’ve continually come into situations where I want to use myself as a frame and a lens to look at things that are larger than me. I hope the choices I made in this memoir about what parts of my personal story to share are all in service of larger questions or broader themes. I got extremely sick, and I spent a lot of my life employed in self-erasure and political compromise. Those forces that harmed me and that disciplined me into self silencing and self erasure still present a danger to many people. So I’m not saying that I have all this wisdom to offer. This is more of a cautionary tale.

Stories are very powerful ways to convey truths that can be theoretical or hard to grasp. Yes, I am a journalist by training, but it’s very freeing to open oneself up to multiple mediums and multiple tools. I try to respond to the need or the impulse or the question and pick up what tools make sense in that moment.