In The Self-Made Map, Tom Conley argues that “The self makes itself or is made to look self-like when it appears to be a simultaneous cause and effect of a creation that is both total and local. . . The self becomes autonomous only when it is fixed to an illusion of a geographic truth (often of its own making).” The interdependence Conley highlights between selfhood and space lies at the heart of Miral al-Tahawi’s Brooklyn Heights. The 2010 novel details the immigration experiences of an Egyptian mother and her son in their New York City neighborhood. Al-Tahawi emphasizes the immigrant’s need to establish the kind of “geographic truth” Conley describes, even when this truth is constructed by the immigrant herself. As the protagonist, Hend, walks the streets of Brooklyn, she engages in processes of mapping that situate her among diverse communities. Despite Hend’s insistence upon memorizing and fixing her new place, however, the novel suggests that maps are not comforting, fixed entities. Instead, the cartography of Brooklyn Heights is undermined by the unreliability of its own tools—street signs, landmarks, and especially memory. At the heart of the novel lies an intense anxiety about forgetting that not even the most elaborate of maps can dispel. Dementia haunts the characters of the novel, threatening them with a clinical version of the malady they already suffer. If dementia is a predominant condition at a moment in time when, ironically, maps are so pervasive, our ability to claim that we are lost or on the right track, at home or in a strange place, ill or well becomes immensely complicated. By unsettling these dichotomies through the constant emphasis on forgetting, al-Tahawi explores a more fluid picture of the role of memory and individuals’ relationships to the past and present. The immigration narrative complicates these dichotomies still further; moving away from them helps al-Tahawi to suggest possible responses a new immigrant might have to her homes and communities. Using these texts, and making an argument for a critical discourse that thinks about memory and geography in tandem, my paper explores the potential for new modes of reading space and travel in contemporary Arabic literature.