An Immigrant Love-Hate Tale of What this means to become American

You understand that feeling of being at the wrong end of the table? Like you’re at a celebration but all the good stuff is happening out of earshot (#FOMO)? That’s lifestyle—specifically for an immigrant.

What happens whenever a shy, awkward Arab woman having a strange name and an regrettable propensity toward facial hair is uprooted from her comfortable (albeit fascist-regimed) homeland of Iraq and thrust in to the cold, alien city of Columbus, Ohio—using its about The Wrong End of the Table: A Mostly Comic Memoir of a Muslim Arab American Female Just Trying to Fit in Egg McMuffins, Barbie dolls, and children performing doctor everywhere you turned?

That is Ayser Salman’s story. Initial comes Emigration, after that Naturalization, and finally Assimilation—trying to squeeze in among her blonde-haired, blue-eyed counterparts, and usually feeling left out. On her trip to Americanhood, Ayser witnesses a blowjob at pre-kindergarten daycare, breaks one of her parents’ guidelines (“Thou shalt not participate as an professional in the institution musical in which a male cast member rests his head in thy lap”), and other things great Muslim Arab women are not likely to perform. And, following the 9/11 attacks, she experiences the isolation of being a Muslim in her own country. It requires hours of therapy, fifty-five rounds of electrolysis, and some ill-advised passionate dalliances for Ayser to grow into a modern Arab American woman who embraces her social differences.

Component memoir and component how-not-to guide, THE INCORRECT End of the Desk is everything you desired to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as for example “Body art and Additional National Security Dangers,” “You May’t Blame Everything on Your Period; Occasionally You’re Likely to Be a Crazy Bitch: and Other Advice from Mom,” and even an open letter to Trump. This is the story of each American outsider on the path to end up in a nation of beautiful diversity.