This article was originally published by This Week in Palestine and is republished with permission.

The cover of Jean Said Makdisi's book "Teta, mother and me."

When Jean Said Makdisi decided to write this family chronicle, she discovered she knew little about Teta, her grandmother's past, and not enough about her own mother's life.

Using unpublished family documents, the memories of friends and acquaintances, and histories of the region and period, Makdisi traces her family's personal story against the backdrop of political events as they take place in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States.

The story begins in the 1880s with her grandmother's early childhood in Ottoman Syria; details her mother's experiences of two world wars and their repercussions for the Middle East; and concludes with the author's own experience of raising a family in Beirut, amidst the endless, futile, disillusioning fratricide of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90).

This remarkably intimate biography reveals the unsung private histories of three extraordinary women - as they work, socialise and raise families under the most difficult of circumstances - and through them the history of the Arab people.

Much more than just a memoir - it is a discovery for both the author and the reader of a richer and more complex past for Arab women than both ever would have imagined. Poignant yet uplifting, "Teta, Mother and Me" is a powerful testimony to the author's lifelong struggle towards a state of independence and her negotiation of the often conflicting demands of work and family.

The last two parts of the book are dedicated to the early and then later years of the life of Hilda Musa Said, her mother. Makdisi is the sister of the late scholar, intellectual and Palestinian activist Edward Said. For those who have read Edward Said's autobiography "Out of Place," the towering effect that Hilda Said had on the lives of her children is familiar.

In her daughter's book, a female perspective is added, with all its insights, tenderness and inevitable clashes. For indeed Makdisi's book is not just about reminiscences, but a social study carefully charting the quality of life of the women who came before her.

Having described the huge impact that the women's movement had on her during a decade-long stay in the United States, Makdisi imbues "Teta, Mother and Me" with a feminist approach. Yet the book is a merger of many things, at once a memoir of a beloved parent and grandparent; a historical novel charting the unrelenting upheavals that characterized 20 century Arab history and a social study of the lives of women in the Middle East, a subject too long ignored.

Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem in 1940. She studied in Cairo and the United States. She is the author of "Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir," selected as the New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year in 1990. She lives in Beirut, where she remained with her husband and their three sons throughout the civil war.

Teta, Mother and Me is available on Amazon.com.