Foot of The Bed

Abstract

This thesis includes excerpts from a novel in progress. My literary fiction novel, with the working title, Foot of the Bed, is set in Cairo, beneath the Pyramids and unfolds over one wedding night and two generations. A conversation between a bride and a stranger exposes an emotional, familial truth that binds mother and daughter across thirty years. My story orbits around Nour and Ferdos, celebrating and contemplating how they are forced to survive and how gender paradigms, womanhood and family ties play into their story. Using braided narratives and intimate, emotionally charged dialogue within a bottle setting, the novel leaves the reader with a truth: that lives shaped by the need to survive and protect carry invisible costs, and that empathy, once practiced and spoken, can ultimately heal.