In light of the recent publishing trend of Middle Eastern women's memoirs, which so often depict a confrontation with American culture, writers have been capturing the fragility of their position in American society while adopting the form of testimonial literature. In my talk, I will be focusing on the modes of self-representation in Middle Eastern women's personal narratives, paying careful attention to the narrative strategies that Arab American authors use to negotiate art and meaning within memoir. In so doing, I will determine how in autobiographical writing, the authors via their female protagonists, are sharing their experiences of traversing cultural borders and creating a complicated view of ethnic American cultural identity. I am invested in asking: why memoir, and what are the ways in which authors are reformulating and expanding the genre? In parodying the memoir genre, Arab American writer, Rabih Alameddine, creates a complex narrative framing to disrupt the convention of memoir in his fictional memoir, _I, the Divine_. Though a man, the author creates a fictional memoir from the perspective of a Lebanese American woman, Sarah Nour El-Din, who attempts to write her life story in a series of first chapters. Alameddine draws attention to the difficulty of succinctly and chronologically writing one's life story in an autobiographical work, while also engaging the literary form of memoir. In creating a fictional memoir, the author adopts the form of writing so fashionable for contemporary Arab American writers, yet resists rendering his protagonist as a transparent native informant and cultural guide for American readers. While the fictional memoir uncovers the politics of autobiographical writing, autobiographical fictions or "autobiofictions," such as Mohja Kahf's first novel, allows for the author to incorporate autobiographical elements her fictional work. Though her novel _?Girl in the Tangerine Scarf_ is a fictional bildungsroman about the life of Syrian American, Khadra Shamy, it bears autobiographical resemblance to Kahf. By using fiction, she is able to delve into sensitive and somewhat taboo issues surrounding her Muslim community while discussing American politics without having to claim testimonial authenticity. Thus, in my talk, I investigate how two Arab American writers manipulate the convention of autobiographical writing by intentionally blurring the lines of fiction and nonfiction.