Although no one word ultimately brings Said peace with her identity, she does gradually come to embrace her heritage and find acceptance and belonging in a group of aspiring Arab-American actors. Anyone who ever wished her life was simpler or more like someone else's will identify with Said's beautifully told story. Looking For Palestine reminds us that not one person is so simple that his or her identity can be summed up in a single word. I needed to put them in a box, so I could figure out who I was, but then I was told they'd never do that because they didn't hate Palestinians. I just wanted them to be one of the Christina families that spoke French and followed a certain party logic. She spoke candidly about this identity struggle throughout the memoir: When I was starting to put together the facts about the civil war in my teenage years, I really wanted my family members to be on one side or another so that everything would make sense.
This desperation ultimately manifested in self-disdain and an eating disorder that persisted through her college years at Princeton. Growing up, Said felt a clash between her home life and her school life, and became desperate for an identity to hold on to.
Said's story becomes unconventional, however, when she reveals that her father was Edward Said, a prominent Palestinian and the author of Orientalism, her mother was deeply attached to her Lebanese roots, and her parents encouraged her to avoid stereotypes or "picking sides" in Middle Eastern politics. She was raised on the Upper West Side where her father was a professor at Columbia, attended a private school where she idolized the plethora of blondes from wealthy families, and enjoyed traveling and singing along to the soundtrack of Joseph's Technicolor Dreamcoat. In some ways, Said's upbringing was typical of middle-class New York City families. The following pages reveal a woman's quest to to achieve the impossible: Summing herself up in a word. "I am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman, but I grew up as a Jew in New York City," Said explains in the opening sentence of her memoir, Looking For Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family(Riverhead). If anyone were ever justified an identity crisis, Najla Said would be the candidate.
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