Throughout the book, Mrie evokes poignant sensory details from the very memories she tried for years to run from; from the call of the fishmonger in her hometown of Jableh, to the smell of flavoured tobacco in old Damascus’ hookah bars, from the way light reflects off jewelry hanging in Istanbul’s Istiklal street, to the way a lover wriggles his arm through the grills of her front door to knock to avoid ringing the doorbell and waking up flatmates.
Mrie says her healing process was very much a part of her ability to write in a way that her readers found themselves laughing, loving, and losing with her.
“I was doing EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing] therapy, where you need to recall all sides of your memories; you really have to visualize it in your brain and put yourself [in the time it happened],” she says. “I would feel suffocated while writing things, and would see my therapist; I was able to process my memories with her but also on the page.”
Her act of putting words on the page was an act of defiance in solidarity with those who came from backgrounds like hers. She explains that her memoir wasn’t a way to point fingers at individuals. Rather, it served as a mission to “call out systems and dynamics that made her losses possible.” Yet, Mrie faced fierce internal battles between the many facets of her cultural identity that made her question her portrayal of Syrian society. She feared that any criticism of her country and people would be weaponized by those who harbored ill feelings against Arabs or Muslims. She observes that it’s a common phenomenon among diaspora writers to hold back on criticizing their countries for fear of worsening the tightening claws of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. Every sentence she wrote was while walking the tightrope of letting her Syrian side — and the side influenced by the west — exist in harmony.
“I think I owe it to my people in Syria [to not] whitewash my community to battle stereotypes in the US,” she says. “At the end of the day, I’m writing this book about Syria for Syrians and for people who want a closer look at my culture and life.”
Mrie delves into the intricacies and social dynamics within the Alawite community, an offshoot of Shia Islam that was politically dominant until the fall of the regime in December 2024. In Syria’s strained sectarian landscape, it is now a refrain among the community that Alawite girls are unveiled and hence free, as opposed to the Sunni majority. Alawites are also seen widely as responsible for the crimes of the Assad regime as a whole — a dangerous generalization that has prompted vigilante violence and discrimination against the group by many.
In the early days of the revolution, Mrie’s friend Emad, a Christian intellectual who admired revolutions and revolutionary thinkers, tried to dissuade her from fanning the flames of her curiosity. He defends the Assad regime, discounting the protesters with the derisive title of “Abu Shahata,” the slippered thong, alluding to the perceived poverty of those taking to the streets.
Emad was a synecdoche for large parts of the Syrian population who associated the idea of liberation with personal freedoms alone, something many believed Assad ensured. Yet, growing up, Mrie’s father strived to keep her sister and her financially dependent on him, while trying to ingrain in their minds that a woman was worth nothing if she was not a wife and mother. Mrie recounts how as a teenager, only her male cousins were allowed to speak to religious leaders to learn secrets of the sect, evincing how gender inequality was embedded even into religion. Women in her community often faced pressure to stay with husbands who cheated on them, placing the burden of avoiding familial rupture solely on their shoulders.
“I think it’s a very dangerous thing when Alawites or the West consider that the community is liberal just because of the way their women dress,” she says. “Alawite women are victims of the patriarchy too; this is a problem in the Arab world as a whole.”
Parts of Defiance are hard to read and yet refreshing, simply by virtue of Mrie’s bold frankness. When she’s trolled online for her work with a reference to Karl Marx, she admits she had to Google him. She doesn’t hold back on sharing the darkest depths of her mind, her interior voice, with her readers. She does the same with her characters, presenting them as humans with virtues and flaws.
“I hate stories that are very simplistic,” she says, explaining that contemporary media often falls back on contrived binaries, “and that’s what I try not to do, because life is not binary. It is complicated, and so are conflicts.”
On Dec. 7, 2024, Mrie was in an alcohol rehabilitation center in California when she found herself confronted by something that had failed her in the past — hope. A rebel advance from Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib was making surprising progress, but she was scared to be optimistic. Patients were given limited access to their phone anyway, and she tried to stay disconnected. “I was so fragile from the years of having hope, losing it, then having it again,” she says. “I was also focusing on myself — my healing and recovery,” she says.
As a staffer was checking her vitals, she had an urge to find out. With her index finger in an oximeter, she stretched her other hand out for her mobile phone. Upon seeing the notifications that lit up her screen, she says, she knew.
“Assad fell,” she said in disbelief.
In response, the man checking her vitals only smiled politely.
In that moment, she felt lonely, acutely aware that he had no clue about the death and destruction that had culminated in her being able to say this sentence.
Throughout Defiance, Mrie delineates this sense of alienation that had trailed her all her life — she was the sole member of her family who joined the anti-Assad protest movement. Her exile in Turkey was permeated by hesitation to truly assimilate or accept. Today, Mrie has stopped associating home with a physical or geographical space.
“Syria will always be my identity; it is me, and I love it. But I no longer confuse love with belonging,” she says. “Home for me is where I can be myself.”
In the months that followed the regime’s fall, Mrie considered returning to Syria, but abandoned the idea soon after massacres on Syria’s coast in March 2025, when Assad loyalists launched an attempted uprising and government forces carried out the large-scale slaughter of thousands of Alawites, including women and children.
“Is this a win for the Syrian uprising? Absolutely not!” she exclaims, denouncing the slowness of the missing persons file and transitional justice procedures, a recent ban on makeup for public sector employees in Latakia, and an alcohol ban in Damascus.
“Now is the time for the government to build an inclusive political atmosphere where people can learn to do politics and lift the nation; make sure reconstruction is happening, and that transitional justice is on its way,” she says.
Defiance, at its core, is about one woman’s journey losing and finding herself, while also being the story of the Syrian civil war in all its glory and gore. It’s a tale of immense loss laced with hope. It’s at once a story about holding on and one about moving on. Though there is an air of finality in many of the chapters, where Mrie points out the last time she sees someone she lost, or spoke to someone who left, it is still a tale about the human instinct to endure.
Loubna Mrie’s Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria was published by Viking in February 2026 and is available for order.
