Excellent Things in Women

Sometimes, only the most heartbreaking memories possess the capacity-in their elegiac immediacy-to take our breath away. With Excellent Things in Women, Sara Suleri offers the reader a delicately wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan. Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with her own intimate experiences-relating the tumult of growing up female during a time of fierce change in the Middle East in the 1960s and '70s. In the two selections presented here, "e;Excellent Things in Women"e; and "e;Meatless Days,"e; we watch as Suleri re-encounters the relationships that inform her voyage from adolescence to womanhood-with her Welsh mother; her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z. A. Suleri; and her tenacious grandmother, Dadi, along with her five siblings-as she comes to terms with the difficulties of growing up and her own complicated passage to the West.