Beirut Fragments

A landmark memoir that stands as a testament to survival, memory, dignity, and the stubborn beauty of insisting on one’s place in the world, named a 1989 New York Times Notable Book.

Jean Said Makdisi—Palestinian writer, scholar, and sister of the late critic Edward Said—has lived in Beirut since the 1970s. First published in 1989, Beirut Fragments endures as a beautifully wrought, intimate record of civilian life through Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war and the Israeli invasion of the early 1980s.

At once clear-eyed and deeply compassionate, a portrait of everyday survival—shattered streets, sudden silences, the fragile rituals of family life—told with a storyteller’s grace and emotional precision. As Jean and her husband choose to remain in their war-torn city, raising their children and teaching at the local university, she renders both the terror and the tenderness of living through catastrophe.

Amid ongoing regional violence and global patterns of displacement and erasure, Beirut Fragments offers a rare, layered perspective on identity, endurance, and the radical act of staying put when the world tries to unroot you.

“Profound, heartbreaking…Makdisi’s…words [are] worth listening to, and her faith in humanity worth emulating.”
—The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“An impassioned cry against indifference.”
—The New York Times Book Review