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However, as the title suggests, Said's memoir is a far more ambivalent and at times personally painful account of his early years in Palestine, Egypt and the Lebanon, and the often paralysing embrace of his loving but often overbearing parents. Said's memoir is powerfully informed by his sense of personally, geographically and linguistically "always being out of place." Born to Christian parents, caught between expressing himself in Arabic, English and French, Said evokes a vivid but often very unhappy portrait of growing up in Cairo and the Lebanon under the crushing weight of his emotionally intense and ambitious family. The early sections of the book paint a poignant picture of the oppressive regime established over the awkward, painfully uncertain young "Edward" by his loving mother and expectant, unforgiving father, both of whom cast the longest emotional shadows over the book. Those expecting an account of Said's subsequent intellectual development will be disappointed; apart from the final 50 pages that deal with Said's education at Princeton and Harvard, Out of Place is, as Said says, primarily "a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world, my early life." It is this carefully disclosed record that accounts for Said's deeply conflicting relationship towards both his family and the Palestinian cause. Composed in the light of serious illness, Out of Place is an elegantly written reflection on a life which has movingly come to terms with "being not quite right and out of place." - -Jerry Brotton
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