Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1968 to an American father and an Armenian-Lebanese mother.
She grew up in Los Angeles, but as a child in the years before the Lebanese Civil War, she spent summers in Beirut with her mother's family.
Her first book and the beginning of a trilogy of novels, Three Apples Fell from Heaven (2001), is set in Turkey between 1915–1917 and depicts the Ottoman government's genocide of the Armenian population.
[2] Her second book in the trilogy, The Daydreaming Boy (2004), which earned her the 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction, is centered on a middle-aged survivor of the genocide living in a 1960s Beirut which itself is facing collapse.
Marcom's fourth novel — whose original title “The Edge of Love" was a reference to Clarice Lispector's story That’s Where I’m Going — was published by Dalkey Archive Press as The Mirror in the Well (2008).