Betty Shamieh was the first Palestinian American playwright to have a play produced off-Broadway. She describes her debut novel, Too Soon, as a "Palestinian American Sex and the City." The novel follows three Palestinian American women across generations as they navigate love and identity. In today's episode, Shamieh speaks with NPR's Pien Huang about using comedy as a way to humanize characters who may be dehumanized in the real world, the 10 year writing process for the book, and how she didn't necessarily want to write it, but she knew she had to.

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