Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family. The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England. She married a Lebanese academic, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut in 1972, where she taught English and Humanities at the Beirut University College. They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Israeli invasion. Makdisi documented the city's decline in her first book, "Beirut Fragments: a war memoir" (1989):