The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Alameddine, Rabih. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible. Grove Press, 2025.

The novel opens in 2023 in Beirut. Raja Haddad, a 60-something translator and retired high school literature teacher, dyes his 85-year-old mother Zalfa’s hair in their cramped apartment. Zalfa has trusted him with her hair for decades and treats mirrors like intimate confidants. As Raja works, the two gossip about their neighbors and friends: Odette upstairs, who obsessively washes banknotes and masks on her balcony, and the local butcher, Abou Sami. Raja mentions his cousin Nahed, who used to live in the building and recently moved out, a loss that secretly unsettles him. Their domestic routine, punctuated by Raja’s insomnia, cannabis edibles, and devotion to their cats Monet and Manet, feels at once loving, absurd, and suffocating.

Raja then insists that his “true true” story must begin with a lie. He describes the email he received in July 2021 from the American Excellence Foundation, a wealthy Virginia-based nonprofit that offers him a three-month, all-expenses-paid residency and a $9,000 stipend. Desperate and flattered, Raja barely questions the offer, admitting that “gullibility and I have always been chummy.” His best friend and cousin Nahed investigates the foundation online and discovers it was founded by oil magnate Peter Rutledge and his wife Vicky, a glamorous Washington couple rumored to have once kept a young cowboy as part of their marriage. The invitation seems real enough, and Raja mentally spends the money even before he accepts.

To explain why the email feels like salvation, Raja jumps back to 2001. At that time, he had built modest savings in U.S. dollars. When his mother slid into a depression about aging, she announced that only an expensive cosmetic procedure would restore her will to live. Raja, who grew up under a miserly father, had promised himself he would never hoard money the way his parents did. He withdrew $20,000 and paid for Zalfa’s surgery, convincing himself that helping her reclaim her elegance was more important than his financial security.

Years later, Raja watches Lebanon slide into economic calamity. By 2019, a corrupt alliance of politicians, central bankers, and commercial banks has drained the country’s reserves in a giant Ponzi scheme. When ordinary Lebanese, including Raja, try to access their deposits, the banks quietly impose informal capital controls. Raja discovers that his hard-earned savings are effectively gone, trapped in accounts he cannot meaningfully access while the powerful spirit their fortunes abroad. His mother briefly collapses into lethargy and despair, only to roar back as Zalfa the Indomitable—a sharp-tongued, impeccably dressed octogenarian who joins antigovernment protests.

Raja’s older brother Farouk calls from abroad, claiming that he borrowed from loan sharks to fund his children’s education and now must flee Lebanon before they hurt his family. He begs Raja for money. Raja remembers a lifetime of Farouk’s cruelty and casual contempt and refuses to help, though he suspects the loan-shark story is a fabrication designed to pry money from him. He later regrets not warning his mother about Farouk’s plea, feeling that his silence is another small act of gullibility or cowardice.

As the banking crisis deepens, Zalfa marches into a local bank branch, where an exhausted clerk named Miss Zainab becomes the target of a small crowd’s fury. Raja watches as his mother first berates the staff, then abruptly shifts gears, comforts the terrified secretary, and manipulates her into calling a friend in the withdrawals department. Through charm and intimidation, Zalfa secures a limited but precious cash withdrawal for her family while the men outside chant and pound on the glass. Raja is both horrified by her theatrics and awed by her ability to carve out survival in a rigged system.

The years 2019–2020 blur as protests erupt across Beirut. Raja’s students at Madame Taweel’s elite private school report seeing his mother at demonstrations, standing in front of water cannons and chanting slogans. They describe her as elegant, foul-mouthed, and fearless, and gush about how much they admire her. Raja is mortified to learn that his brash mother has become a minor celebrity among his students, and he jokes darkly that the great mistake of his life was failing to shoot her.

Meanwhile, Raja’s home life grows even more crowded: relatives displaced by political and economic crises move in, and his role as caretaker intensifies. He and his mother bicker over politics while watching television coverage of the central bank governor, whom they nickname “Monsieur Micho.” During one argument, Zalfa orders him to his room and then forbids him to leave her side, insisting she cannot “not speak to him” if he is not in the room. Their quarrel ends with the two sulking side by side on the sofa as they rage at the politicians who have stolen their future.

From there, the novel reaches back further in time. Section III (1960–1975) portrays Raja’s childhood in a conservative family where his father dotes on his academically gifted older brother Farouk and dismisses Raja as soft and cowardly. Raja finds solace with his glamorous cousin Nahed and her mother, Aunt Yasmine. He covets a Barbie doll that he and Nahed treat as a shared secret, but the adults quietly remove it from his life, enforcing rigid gender roles. Raja’s father gives him matchbox cars instead and warns him against being “too feminine.” Raja turns to books and daydreams as refuge from bullying at home and school.

Section IV (1975) unfolds at the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Trying to impress popular classmates, Raja accepts a ride with Joe and Yves, two rich boys, and Micheline, the girl Raja secretly adores. Their car is stopped by gunmen at a checkpoint. Joe is shot dead; Raja and Yves are dragged from the vehicle. A teenage militia recruit nicknamed Boodie, whom Raja recognizes from school as a talented football player, intervenes. He claims Raja belongs to his sect and takes him to a garage apartment, ostensibly to protect him. Raja becomes Boodie’s hidden captive and domestic servant, dependent on him for food and safety. The power imbalance slides into abuse, and Raja’s terror is complicated by desire, shame, and the irrational relief of being “kept” rather than murdered.

Later sections trace the long aftershocks of these events. Section V (1975–2021) interweaves Raja’s memories of Boodie and a later romance with a student he tutors, Kamal, with his account of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, which shatters his aunt Yasmine’s home and forces Yasmine and Nahed to move in with him and Zalfa. Section VI (2021) describes Raja’s trip to the American Excellence Foundation’s horse farm in rural Virginia. There he is treated as an exotic guest by the wealthy Vicky Rutledge and her staff until he opens a picture book about the farm and finds a photograph of Boodie, smiling in hunting gear between the Rutledges in 1982. Horrified to see his former captor entangled with the same elite American family now hosting him, Raja panics, confronts Boodie and Vicky in a farcical scene on a country road, and ultimately flees back to Beirut, rejecting their insistence that he must forgive Boodie for his own spiritual health.

In the final section, set later in 2023, Zalfa dies peacefully in her sleep, having long declared she wished to die in her own bed. Raja is left alone in their apartment with the cats and a huge wave of grief. Neighbors and former students stream in to pay their respects. One beloved former student, Randa, returns from abroad and leads her classmates in a group hug that finally breaks Raja’s composure; he sobs openly, hiccupping in front of everyone. Later, over dinner with Madame Taweel and her driver Hassan, Raja learns that his mother and his boss quietly worked to help Hassan’s son secure a place at the prestigious school where Raja taught. Hassan thanks Raja for his supposed advocacy, but Raja realizes he did almost nothing—Zalfa orchestrated it and told Hassan that Raja had forgiven him for past wrongs. She “knew everything,” including trauma he never fully confessed.

By the end of the novel, Raja understands that his mother has been rewriting his story in her own way, just as he constantly revises his memories in his narration. His “true true story” is not a single stable account but a layered, self-aware attempt to confront gullibility, trauma, and love. Alone but surrounded by the traces of his mother’s stubborn will, he continues talking to her and to the reader, trying to honor both the lies that sustained him and the painful truths he has finally begun to face.