Crooked TeethCrooked Teeth

A reckoning with a life spent out of place and a conflicted love letter to homes that can't be returned to.Danny Ramadan did not intend to write a memoir. A celebrated novelist, he spent years sharpening his fiction-writing skills, drawing on his lived experience only to give his stories a ring of authenticity. But what would it mean to step out from behind the characters he imagined and the scenes he dreamed up? Would his triumphs and his craft be seen as clearly as the trauma he endured?Establishing a pact with readers in the opening pages, Danny gives himself the freedom to write about his life on his own terms. He details his childhood in Syria, from his parents fierce conflict and his mothers mental illness to the government seizure of his grandfathers traditional Damascene home. He documents his budding queerness, from moments stolen in internet cafes and darkened movie theatres to discovering the citys underground network of safe homes and a chosen family helmed by a trans matriarch. He charts the origins of his career, from penning fan fiction on message boards to publishing with an independent press in Cairo and reporting on Arab Spring uprisings with self-interested journalists in Beirut. And we witness the journey from his fraught arrival in Vancouver, complicated by a flawed refugee placement program, to a life steadied by comfort, love, and community.Told in an intimate, conversational voice, Crooked Teeth is both a refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative and an invitation to see the fullness and complexity of a life caught between worldstaking in all of its beauty and contradictions, its struggles and its joys.