Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and its Girl, out now from Ballantine Books! The novel follows the blue-skinned, queer second-generation Palestinian-American protagonist Betty Rummani, as she navigates difficult questions in her own life by turning to her memories of her great-aunt Nuha for guidance. The fictional Rummani family are in exile from Palestine, where they had owned a soap factory for hundreds of years, over many generations– a soap factory that was destroyed on the day that Betty was born with blue skin, where the story begins.
With this book, I re-learned how to slow down and actually enjoy reading– reading for the pleasure of it, for beautiful prose, and to immerse myself in a world and a story and an experience. In this conversation we talk about Sarah’s journey with the novel, its relationship with her identity as a second-generation Arab-American, and about navigating being a queer writer.
www.sarahcypher.com
Instagram: @sarahcypher
Twitter: @threepenny
Find us !
Instagram: @queereverythingpodcast
Website: http://www.queereverything.com
YouTube: Queer Everything
Sarah Cypher, author of The Skin and its Girl