Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family. The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England.[2] She married a Lebanese academic, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut in 1972,[1] where she taught English and Humanities at the Beirut University College.[3] They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Israeli invasion. Makdisi documented the city's decline in her first book, Beirut Fragments: a war memoir (1989)In Teta, mother, and me (2005) Makdisi brought alive a century of Arab life though the story of three generations of Arab women: herself, her mother, Hilda Musa Said, and her grandmother, Munira Badr Musa.