Cast Out: Holding On To God

Futoun Haddad was five when her father abruptly disappeared from her life, emigrating to another country in order to earn a living for the family. She never fully recovered from the trauma. In 1975, when she was eleven, a bloody civil war broke out in her home country, Lebanon, which further aggravated her sense of insecurity and danger. Shortly after, her mother joined her father overseas in order to assist him in the business, leaving the family behind and visiting only intermittently. Haddad was left to be cared for by her then nineteen-year-old sister while enduring the fallouts of many more wars, foreign invasions and never-ending skirmishes, fighting, brutal killings, and bombings. At twenty, Haddad left for the U.S. in order to pursue a BA in Journalism. Upon graduation, she married her childhood Lebanese boyfriend and became a naturalized citizen. Her struggles that had begun when she was a child became manifest throughout her adult life: marriage, divorce and the ultimate alienation of her two children twenty-one years later. In 2010, she received her MA in Political Science/International Relations, and she married the love of her life, the subject of the alienation five years later. They live happily in California now. Cast Out: Holding On To God is her first book.