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In her debut novel “Too Soon,” San Carlos author Betty Shamieh chronicles the lives of three generations of women in one Palestinian American family. Shamieh said she comes from “a family of great female storytellers.”
“Who I am and how I came to be is something I learned from the women of my family,” she said. As a playwright, and now as a novelist, Shamieh said, “all I feel my job is to do is to tell a good story.”
“Too Soon” is a blend of bawdy romantic comedy, family saga, historical fiction and more, as Shamieh tries to eschew genre boundaries and easy labeling.
“I like to write works that defy convention,” she said. “I do that a lot in my theater career, and I try that with the book also – to keep the reader on their toes. You don’t know whether you’re going to laugh or cry but you’re going to feel intensely with each page.”
Much of the book follows Arabella, an expletive-prone, ambitious theater director known for her fresh takes on Shakespeare. Shamieh took delight in creating a protagonist who potentially “upends people’s idea of what a Palestinian is or what their story would sound like,” she said. The Peninsula-raised Arabella has always avoided leaning into her heritage and was only “outed” when a fellow Palestinian American artist – her frenemy “Lisa-Turned-Layla” – was interviewed about her work for an article in a prominent theater publication.
With Arabella, “what I wanted to show was someone who was trying to escape a certain identity … even though Arabs often pass as white, you’re never allowed to be invisible, even if you’re trying your dang hardest to not make your life about a conflict,” Shamieh said. Arabella is “forced to confront her identity in the most extreme way” when she’s given the opportunity to lead an Arabic production of “Hamlet” in the West Bank and reluctantly realizes it could be the big break she’s been longing for. There’s also another factor drawing her to the Middle East. Her grandmother has connected her with Aziz, a hunky Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. At 35, Arabella is worried that her career has peaked and that she’s running out of time to find love and become a mother (she’s “an epic failure at dating American-style and equally sucky at catching a husband the old-fashioned way,” as she puts it). Heading to the West Bank not only gives her a probable career boost and a romantic rendezvous but, she hopes, might help her stifle her pesky feelings for Yoav, a talented Israeli American sound designer and Arabella’s friend and creative collaborator since college.
The book alternates between Arabella’s story, set in 2012, and the perspectives of her formidable grandmother Zoya and her mother Naya. All three grapple with maintaining power over their lives in an often patriarchal and prejudiced world.
As a child growing up in Ramallah under British occupation, Zoya imagines scenes of creative resistance for her school chums, and as a mother, turns the traditionally male heroes of folktales and literature into women when telling stories to her children – despite often prioritizing her son over her daughters and denying them the education her own father denied her (while Arabella, the granddaughter who most takes after her, is able to reach the Ivy League). Through Zoya’s eyes, the reader witnesses moments historical and personal, such as her sizzling attraction to the aforementioned Aziz’s grandfather and the family’s journey from its war-torn homeland to the U.S.
Naya, brought by Zoya to the Detroit area in the 1960s (where her father, fearing anti-Arab bias, allows neighbors to assume the family is Greek), grows up feeling a kinship with Black American culture. After she’s married off and thrust into motherhood as a young teen, she eventually reinvents herself among the well-to-do white women of the Bay Area.
While “Too Soon” offers complex characters and sometimes heavy themes, it’s also full of humor.
“I feel that comedy is the thing that connects and humanizes all of us,” Shamieh said. Her hope is that her humor serves as a bridge that “makes people want to read the book who might not otherwise pick up a book by someone like me,” she said.
Shamieh’s characters’ have a refreshing amount of self-awareness about their feelings of lust and longing, their dreams and disappointments.
“I think that my characters are all antiheroines in some ways,” Shamieh said. “They’re in touch with their darker emotions, including what it means to share your body with a baby and to have to adjust your own ambitions accordingly. The mothers of Silicon Valley feel just as depleted by their children as the mothers living in the Middle East.”
Shamieh, who said she couldn’t have written “Too Soon” in the same way without having first become a mother herself, said some elements of pregnancy and motherhood seem universal. “Even though I had a vastly different life than my mother and grandmother, the experience of motherhood, the physicality of it, felt the same,” she said.
Shamieh grew up in Daly City and, after studying at Harvard and Yale, embarked on a thriving creative career, writing many plays, including “Roar,” “The Black Eyed” and “Territories,” to name just a few. Her accolades include being named UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue; earning a Guggenheim Fellowship for Drama and Performance Art; teaching and working at numerous prestigious institutions, including as a visiting artist at Stanford; and becoming a playwright in residence at Classical Theatre of Harlem, which premiered her “Malvolio” (a sequel to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”) in 2023.
Shamieh started working on “Too Soon” more than a decade ago and moved back to the Peninsula from New York so her son could grow up close to her family. Local readers will notice references to landmarks such as Kepler’s Books, where she recently did an author event in conversation with Ayelet Waldman, and a few other Peninsula spots. She said she’s been enjoying becoming part of the local literary community and is also glad to see a flourishing of works by fellow Palestinian American writers.
“There’s a lot of other Palestinian novelists right now. In theater, I was the only one,” she said, noting that back in 2004, “Roar” was the first play by a Palestinian American to premiere off-Broadway. “Coming into fiction was a lot more fun to me because I’m part of a wave as opposed to a pioneer.”
“Too Soon” has gained coverage by major media outlets such as NPR, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, People Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle, which declared it the “must-read book of 2025,” and Shamieh has been especially happy to hear from booksellers and readers from across the country.
“That’s been very nice, to kind of see the wide variety of types of people who are reading and enjoying this book,” she said. Ultimately, the mark of a good story is if it can resonate across cultures, genders and generations, Shamieh said, and it’s her aim as both a writer and a reader to be open to those stories. “The whole point of literature,” she said, “is to be emotionally adventurous and to experience something you can’t experience otherwise.”
More information is available at bettyshamieh.com.
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