Nawal El Saadawi was born in a village outside Cairo, Egypt, in 1931. A trained medical doctor, she wrote landmark works on the oppression of Arab women including Woman at Point Zero (1973), God Dies by the Nile (1976) and The Hidden Face of Eve (1977). After being imprisoned by Anwar Sadat's government for criticising the regime, she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982, before being forced into exile in later life due to death threats by religious extremists. She returned to Egypt in 1996, running for president in 2005 until government persecution forced her to withdraw. Saadawi died in Egypt in 2021.

The accumulated facts of El Saadawi's life sound grim, but this is not the experience of reading her memoir, which is stormy and vivid, characterized by great intellectual and emotional restlessness. Her story [has] a pungency and intimacy that more varnished memoirs often lack. And what shines through it all is her indomitability and self-belief... Stormy and vivid, characterized by great intellectual and emotional restlessness ... It seems certain that without powerful self-belief and faith in her own instincts, she would not have survived

• Foreword by Nadia Wassef1. The Threat2. Spreading My Wings3. The Village Doctor4. The Tripartite Invasion5. What is Suppressed Always Comes Back6. Love and Despair7. My Mother has no Place in Paradise8. Moments that Belong Nowhere9. The Death Threat10. Beyond Consciousness11. The Photograph12. The Scalpel and the Law13. The Defeat14. Searching for Love15. An Aborted Revolution16. The Dream of Flying