Mirrored Loss is an exceptional book—for both the anthropology of Yemen—a discipline that repeatedly returns to the trope of tribal organization, as evidenced by Marieke Brandt's 2021 Tribes in Modern Yemen: An Anthology—and the wider social analysis of the country, dominated in recent decades by political science. It is a biography (in English) drawn from an oral recording (in Arabic) by Amat al-Latif ʿAbdullah al-Wazir (b. c. 1930) of the recollections of her life. Amat al-Latif is the daughter of the leader of the 1948 constitutionalist revolt. In that revolt Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din died, only for the rebels, led by Amat al-Latif's uncle, father, and husband, to be executed. As retribution for the revolt and reward for their support of the Hamid al-Din Imamate, men from surrounding villages looted the houses of Sanaa.

The subject, Amat al-Latif, chose to have her life story recorded for posterity, and her children agreed to the project. Amat al-Latif belongs to a family of scholarship (Appendix IV of the book provides biographies of learned women of the 14th century CE from the al-Wazir family); she herself received an Islamic education starting at a young age. For many years before the recording of Amat al-Latif in 2007, Gabriele Vom Bruck had worked with members of the major sayyid families of Sanaa and the north, whose political preeminence was decimated by the 1962 republican overthrow of the imamate. Vom Bruck's 2005 study, Ruling Families in Transition: Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen, shares many of the concerns deepened in Mirrored Loss: the character of family, the house, memory, and women's role in the construction of morality.

Amat al-Latif's narrative is structured by repeated losses—the early death of her mother; the deaths of her father, of her cousin who was her first young husband, and of her daughter from that marriage; and in 1948 the destruction of the physical house of the family as a sign of its political demise. It is against this background that Amat al-Latif's self-governance and pleasure in life triumphs. The early years of her second marriage to a more distant cousin a few years her junior entailed living in other Arab capitals and saw the birth of three children who have a supportive presence in the text. The move of the family to the UK (with the onset of the Lebanese civil war and for the children's education) and later to the US coincided with years when, like his brothers, her husband returned for periods to Yemen. And so it was that, after eighteen years of marriage, Amat al-Latif faced a further loss: the unannounced marriage of her husband in Yemen to a much younger second wife from the extended family.

Recollections are difficult material out of which to construct a long narrative. Emotional resonances structure the telling and the repetition of episodes; yet emotion can only be translated into text through the artistry (and freedom) of a novelist. Vom Bruck refrains from such an attempt, just as she does from wider sociological analysis of her subject. Instead, she frames the subject's narrative not only with testimonies of Amat al-Latif's adult children, detailed annotation, and magnificent historical photographs, but also with further explorations. These include discussion of her own choices and methods as an anthropologist in the gathering and construction of the narrative; reconstruction of the genealogy and wider family history of al-Wazir; a history of the 1948 constitutional movement; and further accounts of the events of 1948. Before a series of appendices, the book closes with an epilogue on “gender, subjectivity and power” (157–179) in autobiographical narrative. This develops a strong argument that in the autobiographies of Yemenis there is little evidence for emotional expression, or descriptions of domestic and kin life, being the proper domain of women, not of men; the social and class position of the subject is as important as the gender of the narrating subject.

The author's respect for her subject is such that she refrains from sociological abstraction or analysis of the two themes so central in the narrative: patriarchy and the house. Patriarchy in a great political family appears fundamental and empowering in Amat al-Latif's narrative of her relation to her father (her mother's early death only heightening his place in her life). It is clearly distinguished from the fickleness of husbands. Second, the narrative expresses well the historical centrality of the house in the Yemeni imagination of political society. Does the great historical architecture of houses in Yemen not express a social imagination poorly gauged by the anthropologists’ endless rehashing of a sociology of tribes? Last, the author's respect for her subject and the historical depth of the narrative lead Vom Bruck away from analyzing where members of the family, not least Amat al-Latif's second husband, have stood, and stand today, in the conflictual intellectual politics of Yemen.

Mirrored Loss is a text of great sensitivity, quite as accessible and valuable to a wider public as to university students and specialists across history and the social sciences.