Through a close reading of Lebanese-American writer and artist Etel Adnan’s essay, “Growing Up to be a Woman Writer in Lebanon,” this paper examines feminist autobiography as a site to tease out postcolonial anxieties about language and home. Juxtaposing Adnan’s memories to the author’s own, it considers the ghosts that haunt women’s writing – the fraught relationship with motherhood and language – which constitute the condition of production and reception of postcolonial feminist thought. Growing up during the French mandate over Lebanon, Adnan explores her relationship to the French language as a site of escape from maternal authority and of alienation from home. Here, French schools and culture draw the young girl away from the familiar, ultimately leading to her exile from Lebanon. In my analysis, I argue that Adnan’s autobiographical narration of the intertwined processes of alienation and emancipation allow us to confront the transnational anxieties that structure reactions to gendered transformations and women’s emancipation in Arab societies. Furthermore, by using autobiography as a method of writing, not merely as an object of study, the text performs the dynamics it seeks to examine. As such, what results is a triangulation of multiple female subjectivities – Adnan, her mother, the author, her mother – whose experiences of transnational anxieties over identity and belonging often clash and converge. Such triangulation, I show, historicizes female agency. In other words, it allows a consideration of the different historical conditions that shape the female subject, thereby problematizing the reified categories of “Third World woman” and “postcolonialism.”