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The Wrong End of the Table
- A Mostly Comic Memoir of a Muslim Arab American Woman Just Trying to Fit In
- Narrated by: Ayser Salman, Assaf Cohen
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's Summary
An Immigrant Love-Hate Story of What it Means to Be American
You know that feeling of being at the wrong end of the table? Like you’re at a party but all the good stuff is happening out of earshot (#FOMO)? That’s life - especially for an immigrant.
What happens when a shy, awkward Arab girl with a weird name and an unfortunate propensity toward facial hair is uprooted from her comfortable (albeit fascist-regimed) homeland of Iraq and thrust into the cold, alien town of Columbus, Ohio - with its Egg McMuffins, Barbie dolls, and kids playing doctor everywhere you turned?
This is Ayser Salman’s story. First comes Emigration, then Naturalization, and finally Assimilation - trying to fit in among her blonde-haired, blue-eyed counterparts, and always feeling left out. On her journey to Americanhood, Ayser witnesses a blowjob at pre-kindergarten daycare, breaks one of her parents’ rules (“Thou shalt not participate as an actor in the school musical where a male cast member rests his head in thy lap”), and other things good Muslim Arab girls are not supposed to do. And, after the 9/11 attacks, she experiences the isolation of being a Muslim in her own country. It takes hours of therapy, fifty-five rounds of electrolysis, and some ill-advised romantic dalliances for Ayser to grow into a modern Arab American woman who embraces her cultural differences.
Part memoir and part how-not-to guide, The Wrong End of the Table is everything you wanted to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as “Tattoos and Other National Security Risks,” “You Can’t Blame Everything on Your Period; Sometimes You’re Going to Be a Crazy Bitch: and Other Advice from Mom,” and even an open letter to Trump. This is the story of every American outsider on a path to find themselves in a country of beautiful diversity.
Critic Reviews
"Author-narrator Ayser Salman regales listeners with stories of her misfit childhood as an Iraqi immigrant in America's Midwest. She looks back with humor at the ups and downs of being the odd one out most of the time in school. As narrator, Salman sets a rapid pace that carries listeners along from pre-Saddam Hussein Baghdad to day care in Louisville, Kentucky. She recounts every social and cultural misunderstanding with honesty and grace that further draw listeners in. This is an unflinching examination of the complex mix that is childhood, identity, and coming of age in America. Salman narrates these often comic intersections with the warmth of someone confiding to her close friends. By the end of the book, listeners may wish they were." (AudioFile)