Loubna Mrie — Defiance: A Memoir

Loubna Mrie grew up in Syria and became an activist during the 2011 uprising, documenting the revolution from inside while the Assad regime’s response turned from crackdown to mass violence. Defiance is her account of that transformation — what it meant to be young and politically awake in a country where dissent had always carried mortal risk, and what it cost, personally and practically, to act on that awareness anyway. The memoir moves between the intimate and the historical, tracing how ordinary life and extraordinary violence coexist and how they deform each other.

At Politics and Prose, Mrie will be in conversation with Laura Secor, a journalist and author whose work on authoritarian states — particularly Iran — has established her as one of the most thoughtful American writers on what life under repression actually looks like from the inside. The conversation format suits a book like Defiance, which requires a reader willing to ask the harder questions: about choices made under impossible circumstances, about survival and its complications, about what resistance looks like when it cannot be heroic in the way outside observers tend to imagine.

Syria’s recent history — the collapse of the Assad regime, the uncertain transition now underway — gives this conversation an added urgency. Mrie is not a distant analyst but someone who lived through the events whose consequences are still unfolding. This is a rare opportunity to hear that account directly, in a city where policy on Syria has often been made with thin understanding of the human reality the policies touch.