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The Homeland actress’s “recollections of her unconventional youth in war-torn Beirut are heartbreaking yet humorous . . . in this unique” memoir (Publishers Weekly).
Raised in 1970s Lebanon on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. She spent her adolescence defying death in Beirut nightclubs as bombs fell across the city. The more oppressive the country became, the more drugs and anonymous sex she had, fueling the resentment directed at her daily by the same men who would spend the night with her.
As the war dies down, she begins to incur the consequences of her lifestyle. On his deathbed, her father’s last wish is for his favorite song, “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, to be played at his funeral instead of the traditional suras of the Koran. When she does just that, the final act of defiance elicits a catastrophic response from her surviving family members.
In this dramatic true story, Darina Al-Joundi is defiantly passionate about living her life as a liberated woman, even if it means leaving everyone and everything behind in this “beautifully taut and relentlessly unemotional” memoir (Kirkus).
"...beautifully taut and relentlessly unemotional... A pitiless, steely narrative, alternately heartbreaking and compelling." —Kirkus
"The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing is no coming-of-age tale framed by easy, charming reflections on lessons gained from turbulent times. Instead, it’s a feat that runs closer to the bone... The result is profound immediacy. Though readers experience the shock of abuse, even when the “music” stops, there is little doubt about Al-Joundi’s ferocious resolve—right up to the promise in the book’s final line." —Venus Zine
"The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing is an intense, harrowing, and deeply disturbing memoir of a woman's sustained resistance to the world around her. Darina Al-Joundi's story is told with such brutal immediacy, I found myself both moved and frightened. At once personal and historical, the book is the testament of an unrepentant rebel, who, in the end, has no choice but to leave everything and everyone behind her." —Siri Hustvedt, author of The Sorrows of an American
"Darina Al-Joundi's personal liberation became a conquest when it coincided with the civil war in Lebanon. To a merciless world she brings a merciless book."—Etel Adnan, author of Sitt Marie Rose
"Al-Joundi's book reconstitutes the misadventures of her youth in a style that is at once heart-breaking and very funny."—Nancy Huston, author of Fault Lines
Mohammed Kacimi is an Algerian playwright and novelist. His writings include 1962, la Confession d’Abraham, and Terre sainte.
Marjolijn de Jager was born in Indonesia, raised in the Netherlands, and has been living in the US since 1958. She is a literary translator from French and Dutch to English, with a special interest in francophone African and Middle Eastern women writers. She has been awarded several NEH grants, a NEA translation grant, and is a Silver Winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award (2007). She is retired from a 30-year career of teaching French language and literature, as well as literary translation at NYU, where she continues to teach Dutch and French language.