The Buzz...About Books

Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes by Kamal Al-Solaylee is a finalist for this year's Toronto Book
Award.

The first of many 'extremes' Al-Solaylee chronicles  in his memoir concerns his paren'ts' widely
divergent backgrounds: his mother was  an
illiterate shepherdess who married at age fourteen and had eleven children by
her thirty-third year. His father, on the other hand, was a worldly, educated
Anglophile, a wealthy business man in Aden, southern Yemen, then under British
control.  When the socialist government
kicked the British out and confiscated his father's real estate investments,
Al-Solaylee's father packed up his large family and moved  them first to Beirut and then to Cairo.

During these moves other extremes emerged.  His family's wealth seriously declined as his
father, always an outsider, found it hard to make a living.   As time passed, the writer, then a teenager,
heard the tone in the streets and schools shifting towards religious stridency
and a rejection of Western culture.   To
add to the mix, it was during his family's time in Cairo that Al-Solaylee came
out, to himself at least, as a gay teenager. He even discovered an underground
gay culture in Cairo, but it was a brief  refuge. 
When his father decided to move the family back to Yemen, this time to
the capital Sana'a, Al-Solaylee knew he would have to leave his family one day
if he ever wanted any personal freedom.

That he has a Ph.D in Victorian literature and is currently
a professor in Toronto tells you how far from his paren'ts’ world,
Al-Solaylee has taken himself.   But, the physical distance and extreme
differences of culture between his new life and the life of his siblings in
Yemen, which by 2011 had erupted into religious and civil unrest, have filled him with
feelings of guilt which he writes about with great honesty.    

That's
what makes this memoir more than simply a personal story: it's also a record of
the changing political and social climate across the Middle East and a thoughtful, unique coming-out and coming-of-age story.

 And,  in a sweet
touch, he dedicates the book to Toronto "for giving me what I’ve been looking
for: a home"

I highly recommend it. 

Meet the nominees at Yorkville Branch on Thursday October 3rd (that's tonight)!

Watch a brief interview with the author discussing his memoir.

Borrow a copy of the book or read it as an ebook.