Shams Abu-Tayeh's story about My Life as a Man

At first reading, I couldn't stand this book. But something about it intrigued, so I went back for a second reading, but as the book itself is written in what seems to be a random collection of chapters, this time I didn't start from the beginning.

The narrator writes in fits and starts, picks up the timelines and retells the story of his life and loves, over and over, differently each time. So, I took this on board and re-read the book over and over again, starting each time at different chapters, jumping back and forth and, eventually, after many readings, starting from beginning to end again and seeing, finally, how it made sense. It clicked.

So, why did it change my life? How does a book of 70's New York narrated by a divorced and deeply bitter man about his confused life and relationships with women (a book sometimes reviewed as being misogynist) appeal, in fact deeply click, with a 90's teenage girl growing up in an Arabic country? Thinking on it, I believe it was the honest showing of the vulnerable insides we all carry, the bits that bleed and make us squelch--the realisation that other people out there, even apparently adult and sorted, can be feeling all this and share it-- and more important, to make art out of it. For a growing youth with pretension to a future in writing too, it was heartening to see how there is a way to harness life's blows and make them into a book. That, though time can be confused, the confusion can be used as a tool; though hearts can break, those cracks can be literature; and that though sadness can permeate, a touch of humour can make it all a bit better.

My copy of that book, with its ripped and taped black paper cover, is one of those items that still makes me sigh in sadness, remembering leaving youth and childhood country, moving to the very country Roth lived in.