‘Lonely as a Crowded Room’

‘Lonely as a Crowded Room’:

Wit, Love, Death and Everything in Between

By Alia H. Salim

 

Some novels grip you from the first page, not because they fit into your expectations, but because they refuse to. “Lonely as a Crowded Room” is one of these books. Badar Salem’s debut novel moves differently: it’s sharp, dark, and unexpectedly funny. It doesn’t just tell a story, it unsettles. It provokes by refusing to be neatly categorized.

Set in Ramallah—an occupied city brimming with life, unfinished stories, loneliness, broken hearts, and unachievable dreams—the novel follows Majdal, a journalist who describes herself as having “no ambition. none whatsoever.” She doesn’t dream of changing the world or fighting for a cause; her only plan is to leave. She wants to earn a scholarship, pack her bags, and escape the city she both loves and cannot wait to abandon.

Told entirely through years of emails—to universities, scholarship committees, a therapist, BFF, and a lover turned friend turned lover—the novel unfolds in a style that is both intimate and darkly hilarious. This is the story of a woman who, as the Sylvia Plath epigraph reminds us, “was supposed to be having the time of her life,” while instead she finds herself “unfit” for the world, navigating one disappointment after another. This is not your traditional coming- of-age story, it’s more like a coming-to-terms story: with love, with death, and with the absurdity of existence itself.

I first encountered an excerpt in The Markaz Review, and I was immediately drawn in. This was not a typical Palestinian novel, nor did it fit neatly into the category of what’s often labeled as women’s literature. Its style felt fresh, its language effortlessly sarcastic, poetic in just the right places, never overdone, never pleading for admiration.

One line that stuck with me was Majdal’s reaction to her stepmother’s death. In another country, Majdal might have been the prime suspect, but here, she says: “fortunately, we inhabit an occupied country where the sinister thought of daughters killing their stepmothers never occurs.” It’s darkly ironic, both a grim joke and sharp social commentary. The weight of Israeli occupation looms so large that personal grievances seem almost trivial in comparison.

Then there’s her critique of job interviews, especially the dreaded question: “What’s your greatest weakness?” While some candidates are advised to offer the cliché response “perfectionism” (as though being too perfect is somehow a flaw), Majdal skewers the logic behind it: “Come on, if perfectionism is deemed a weakness, then what could be considered a strength? Resurrecting the dead”? (ha ha ha).”

That ha ha ha at the end does something. It’s not just a laugh track; it adds an extra layer of irony that makes the joke land even harder. The humor in the novel isn’t forced or decorative—it’s survivalist, a means of coping, a way of slicing through despair with a well-timed punchline. And yet, for all its sharpness, it never turns cruel. Majdal’s sarcasm is almost entirely self-directed, and it never begs for sympathy. She doesn’t over-romanticize her pain, nor does she wallow in it. Instead, her humor becomes a shield, protecting her from the weight of her own disappointments. This balance between biting wit and raw vulnerability is what makes the novel so compelling.

Majdal’s complicated relationship with her stepmother, her flawed self-perception, her paralyzing anxiety, her gnawing sense of never being enough—all of it felt deeply familiar, and judging by some of the comments I read on Goodreads, I wasn’t alone in seeing pieces of myself in her.

Curious about how much of Majdal was drawn from real life, I reached out to Badar with my questions. A former managing editor of Vice Arabia, now based in Montreal, she didn’t seem as melancholic as her heroine. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that traces of Majdal surfaced in her answers—or maybe that was just me, reading between the lines.

What made you decide to write this novel?

Badar Salem: It wasn’t planned, not really. I found myself writing it almost gradually and then suddenly, it was there. But deep down, I think I was trying to create the book I wished existed when I was growing up, something that spoke to my uncertainty, doubts and fear in a way no other novels had. As a young woman, I was lost—still kind of am. I didn’t know who I was, who I wanted to be, or where I belonged. There were moments of self-doubt so intense that they felt paralyzing, thoughts that spiraled into total darkness. And I know I wasn’t alone in this. These emotions are the everyday reality of so many young people.

For the longest time, Arabic literature was filled with characters who were certain of their paths. Life might have thrown obstacles in their way, but their struggles often felt neatly defined, almost black and white. Good and bad were clear-cut. But life isn’t like that. I don’t believe in stark contrasts, I believe in shades, in ambiguity, in the in-between spaces where most of us exist. I’ve always found comfort in novels where I see pieces of myself reflected in words, where the characters feel as lost and flawed as I do. That’s what I hope this novel would offer to readers, to feel, even for a moment, that sense of relatability. It’s an underrated feeling, but when it happens, it’s everything.

If you had to quantify, how much of Majdal are you, percentage-wise?

BS: Offff, that’s a tough question, I think it was Alain Robbe-Grillet who said, “A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.” I think all writers, whether they admit/realize it or not, end up writing about themselves, about their various selves, in one way or another. So, in that sense, there’s a lot of me in Majdal, but don’t ask me to quantify it—like her, I absolutely hate math. I share her self-sabotaging tendencies, her fears, that constant inner turmoil. But I wouldn’t say I share her bitterness, not to that extent, at least. Maybe writing this novel helped me heal some of that bitterness. So, yeah, there’s a lot of me in Majdal, but also there’s some distance, she carries a weight that I worked to shed over time.

The novel’s footnotes are just as compelling as the main text. Why did you choose to make them part of the storytelling rather than just explanatory?

BS: I’m a bit of a footnote fan—I know that probably sounds nerdy. But I genuinely enjoy reading them. Yes, they can sometimes feel overwhelming and disrupt your connection with the main text or plot, but I find something beautiful about them: the extra layer of work, the research, the hidden sides that add depth. Originally, I intended to use them strictly for explanations and background details, but as I wrote, I realized I wanted them to be more than just supplementary. So, I started slipping in small details—things like the type of books in Majdal’s father’s library. You could still follow the main story without the footnotes, they’re not essential to the plot, but for those who choose to, the footnotes offer something extra. I like to think of it this way: the main story is the meal, and the footnotes? They’re the dessert, the extra layer of flavor, there for those who want to indulge a little more.

To see Palestinians portrayed as broken and lost to this extent is not the norm, almost no one in the novel is unharmed?  

BS: Hmmm, I might not have noticed that aspect consciously, but it’s hard to live under occupation and come out completely unharmed. In literature, I see many young writers moving away from the typical portrayal of Palestinians as these strong, undefeated figures. But being lost or struggling with despair doesn’t necessarily equate to feeling defeated; you can be many things at once, complexity is part of being human.

I’m against the two-dimensional portrayal of Palestinians—or any people for that matter—as simply this or that. Humans are complicated, we’re a mix of emotions, experiences, and contradictions. And that’s the norm. The expectation that we must always be strong or triumphant is not only unrealistic, it’s harmful. We need to move away from glorification and embrace a fuller picture of what it truly means to exist under occupation.

You touch on many issues in the novel: religion, marxism, mental health, and even menstruation. Were you trying to start debates or did it all just spiral out organically, one existential crisis at a time?

BS: Hahaha, I have to admit, I’ve always liked being in the minority. As someone once said, if too many people agree with me, I start to feel wronged. But when it comes to writing the novel, I didn’t have a checklist of topics I wanted to cover or debates I wanted to spark. I just wrote about the things that mattered to the characters, what shaped them, what haunted them. I tend to challenge these themes more directly in my articles, but fiction works differently. In the novel, everything happened organically, one existential crisis at a time as you say, each shaped by the anxieties and contradictions of our age, and of course, by the limits of our own ability to make sense of it all.

How much losing your mother influenced this novel?

BS: Losing a parent is one of the hardest things, no matter your age or how close you were. It leaves a permanent chill in your heart. I lost my mother at a young age, and for a long time, I almost forgot about her. But lately, I’ve found myself thinking about her all the time. Grief has its own timing.

I don’t miss having a mother in the way people might expect, because I don’t know what it means to have one. What I know is what it means not to. I felt that absence deeply while writing the novel. It surfaced in ways I couldn’t control. There are questions I still carry with me, questions that will never be answered: the sound of her laugh, the way colors reflected in her eyes, the warmth of her smile, the tightness of her hug. So yes, that loss undoubtedly influenced the way I write, but in ways I still don’t fully understand.

What happened to Majdal, did she find a way out?

BS: I cannot say for certain. I prefer to leave Majdal’s fate open-ended. I think she would appreciate the ambiguity. Maybe she’s still wandering, searching for an escape, perhaps love found her, or perhaps she let it slip through her fingers. That uncertainty, that unexplained ache, is part of life’s messy journey. Like all of us, she is not defined by one clear path, but of the many possibilities of what might have been.

Alia H. Salim is a Palestinian essayist based in Ramallah. You can find her at @politically_incorrect80.

Editor’s note: Tomorrow, thanks to Alia H. Salim, we will have an excerpt of Lonely as a Crowded Room in the author’s translation.