An interview with Mariam Said, whose mother, Wadad Makdisi Cortas’s memoir has just been published by Nation books. A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, is a meditation on Arab identity in the twentieth century and of Cortas’s life in Lebanon as a woman, educator, and activist. Though Said knew that her mother had written a memoir some years ago, the first copy was only uncovered by a distant relative in Iraq on the eve of the US invasion. The book and its evocation of a lost world could not have come at a more critical moment.