Ferraris met her future husband in San Francisco. He had come to the city from Saudi Arabia to escape an arranged wedding; an American woman would be a fine antidote, Ferraris thought, especially one who had surprisingly similar values. They were married in San Francisco in 1991 when Ferraris was just 21 years old.
Ferraris had traveled widely -- first as a child of an Army colonel hopping from base to base, later in a high school exchange program to Germany -- but she had never been to an Islamic country. During her visit, she was cloistered with her husband's female relatives. Her mother-in-law disapproved of her son's American wife. That it was shortly after the Gulf War didn't endear her to anyone. She kept quiet enough that her mother-in-law assumed she knew no Arabic.
When out in public, Ferraris always wore the veil and traveled with a male escort. She still often ended up on the wrong side of the religious police because of her skin color. They would ask her to wear socks or gloves or just to stay home.
"They would tell me nicely, 'You're too white to be out,' " she said. "My mother-in-law thought it was because white skin is considered the most beautiful, so it's even sexier and more seductive."
Still, she saw enough of Jidda to faithfully render it in "Finding Nouf": the overbearing public art dotting the city's roundabouts, the well-air-conditioned modern meeting places where women could forgo veils and a market selling unnecessary jackets to the showy Saudi rich.
And Ferraris found many similarities between her own upbringing and life in Saudi Arabia.
"I often thought that growing up in the military was a lot like growing up as an Arab. Culturally there were similarities, like marrying young and having lots of kids and being nomadic, but still having a very regimented life."
As a teenager, Ferraris said, her "big dream was to be a mom." Security and stability, not college and freedom, were her goals, and her husband shared them. Even in Jidda, the dawn summons to prayer didn't bother her, because it reminded her of waking up to reveille.
But Ferraris was also pulled by the nontraditional and unfamiliar about him. "I think there was a desire for exoticism, and in a sad way, he was that. . . . This whole world opened up, and he was capable of conveying it to me without it being dry and academic. It was real, and present."
