The Detroit Metro Times • Feb. 15, 2012
I first met author and foreign correspondent Annia Ciezadlo in New York City. Like me, she was a Midwestern mutt torn between the city’s seductive bustle and the airs it put on. It was the early 2000s, a decade before Ciezadlo published her stunning memoir, now out in paperback, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War. The book chronicles her “honeymoon in Baghdad” in 2003, the months she spent there, and her subsequent move to Beirut, all the while working as a foreign correspondent alongside her Lebanese husband, journalist Mohamad Bazzi. (Like many Lebanese, Bazzi has family in Dearborn.)
I caught up with Ciezadlo while she cooked up greens and shallots to talk about what it’s like to move to the Middle East as an American woman — and how stories of daily life and meals tell us as much about a country as the tales of its wars.
