Zoë's Blog

Sorry - couldn't help it! Warning: SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the trilogy, there is a reveal of story developments in this post. The good news: I am just putting the finishing touches on a fourth book in the Katya and Nayir series. You read that right. After all this time! But first, to all the people who reached out to me about continuing this series, I want to say a huge thank you—your emails and DMs have been an incredible source of encouragement and support. I apprecia

During my last visit to Jeddah, my daughter and I went to visit her father, my ex-husband. He and his family had moved outside the city, an hour’s drive from my apartment in al-Balad through increasingly spacious, undeveloped neighborhoods where big-box retail stores were rubbing shoulders with the desert. Situated improbably in a rather desolate area of unpaved roads and eerie quiet, my ex’s house was a sprawling, dilapidated villa. My daughter, who had lived there for a few

There are plenty of things that might characterize Saudi Arabia for aesthetic effect—a Bedouin teapot, if we’re being cliche, or the outline of a mosque. But during my last trip to Jeddah, I found myself noticing what I would call a more wide-ranging aesthetic. It is a stark combination of minimalism and ornamentation, like a vast empty sky and a single, modern minaret, decorated in geometrical forms. Geometric patterns are technically Islamic—they show up all over the Muslim

I took a pole dance class recently. I’ve done this numerous times in the past, but what made this class different was its focus on embodiment of the erotic, divine feminine. What this translates into is following what our bodies want us to do. It takes practice to not only listen to the cues your body provides, but to stay engaged with that listening and actively follow its advice. For years, I’ve taken dance classes and worked my way through them, Hermione-Granger-style, doi

For those who don’t know, a misyar is a marital contract that is sometimes used in Islamic countries. In it, a woman gives up rights she would have in a traditional marriage (cohabitation, financial support). The couple usually agrees to live separately. I would say there is a general sense of loose responsibility around the misyar. For example, a man might have a misyar marriage with a woman when he already has a wife, and feel no obligation to tell his first wife about it.

On my first day in Jeddah, I rented a car. I was delighted and smug, sitting in the office thinking something that once seemed like an impossible dream: I am a woman, renting my own car in Saudi Arabia. I was drawn to that car rental because the Google category boxes highlighted that the business was “moral,” but one of the categories had seven references to “exorcist.” I should have asked for more information, but a friend of mine used to be an exorcist and once told me it w

The second in a series of posts about you Hi everyone. Welcome back to my series about the unconscious mind, or what I call the Inner Self . This is a subject I’ve been obsessed with for a long time, because the Inner Self is literally the basis of all creativity and desire, which means that it affects all of us, all the time. And I think we completely misunderstand it—and I mean, deeply . For most of us, the Inner Self is this dank repository of memories and suppressed urges

Hi everyone. This month I’m doing a series about a pretty important topic—you. Specifically, your Inner Self—a.k.a. your unconscious mind. This subject has obsessed me for years, because it is connected to every aspect of our creativity. So I’m going to share my insights on the Inner Self, and I think they’ll surprise you. We think of this space as one of repression and dark impulses—it is not. We think of this space as inaccessible or difficult to access—it is not. We think

The medieval senses were bonkers One of the things I continue to experience while researching medieval medicine is just how much their ideas resonate today—and not only resonate, but maybe we really need to hear them again. Recently, I’ve been captivated by the way medievals understood the senses. Today, we tend to believe that our senses are receivers. We take in information, and it gets processed by the brain, boom. But in the medieval period, the senses were more like a tw