A painful search for identity as the bi-sexual narrator attempts the seemingly-impossible: to find love and to please her traditional mother. Switching between New York, Beirut, Washington and the West Bank this is an often dizzying sequence of partners, cultures and countries given an immediacy by the first person narration.
Only now, years later, do I think I understand. It was in that moment that she first realized: I wasn't like her. The trousers were a demarcation line, one that separated me from my mother and her lineage. I wonder sometimes if that day was the start of something, whether it's when I began this habit of constant seeking, endlessly striving to earn my way back, a pattern that would send me on a misguided and self-destructive quest for love .... She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has seen it before I could.
