California Book Club: Laila Lalami

Introduction hey good evening everyone hello and welcome to Alta journals California book club it's a thrill to be here tonight for uh Leila lames um the other Americans extraordinary novel uh we're gonna have special guest Dany Senna and tonight's host is alta's books editor David lulan my name is blae zurga I'm ala journal's editorial director and I'm zooming in from San Francisco I'd encourage everyone to say hello in the chat and and let us know where you're joining from um while you're doing that I wanted to go over some housekeeping please uh tonight's event is part of the California book club alter journals free monthly Gathering featuring books that reflect the wonderful humanity and diversity of life in the Golden State uh in the weeks leading up to each club's meeting Alta online.com publishes numerous articles interviews and essay about that month's pick um so go there and if you haven't already you know read up on the other Americans um you want to make sure you do that uh 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there you are thanks blae thanks so much it's a real pleasure to be here um and and and an honor to to be here um talking to Lila Lamy um a friend a friend a colleague someone I've known for many years um and I'm really excited to talk about um the other Americans the other Americans is a book that um operates in a number of different registers this is one of the things that we'll we'll be talking about it's a social novel it's a thriller in a certain sense a crime novel there's a mystery at the center of it um but mostly what I find particularly striking about the book is the is the panoply of voices the idea this is a novel that works as a kind of a A Chorus or with um nine Central characters um each of whom speaks for themselves in in a variety of ways um Leila and I will be talking about um the way the book got constructed and how those voices work what it does um most most significantly is it it it complicates our sense of empathy as a as readers there are no clear-cut heroes or villains in this book just complicated um human beings all of whom are operating from a Vari for for a variety of reasons and out of a variety of influences um some their own some imposed upon them by Family by Society um by by American culture and so it really does create a dynamic in which all of us every character in the book and even those of us who are reading the book operate as other Americans um and and cast into question in an interesting and compelling and essential way the the complicated issue of what it it it means to be an American we'll talk about that too Lea's written about some of those issues in her essays um which were collected in a in a in a book uh that came out right around the beginning of the pandemic or the year of the P pandemic um called conditional citizens um she's also the author of uh of four other novels and um four other sorry excuse me four other novels hope and other Pursuits secret Sun the Moors account uh and the fourth novel I should say three other novels in the fourth uh coming novel The Dream hotel which maybe we'll get to talk a little bit about and get a sneak preview but enough of me let's bring on um Lila Lamy uh welcome to the California book club hi David how are you nice to see you good how are you I'm well I'm well I'm gonna I would be remiss in asking since you are um you're on the opposite Coast um you're spending the year on the opposite Coast um how is how uh how are how are things in that distant that distant land I'm coming from Los Angeles it's windy and it's cold and it's late so it is it is different I'm having a good time I'm in Cambridge this year I'm having a good time but I am missing California I'm glad you're having a good time and I hope getting a lot I hope you're willing to talk a little bit about what you what you're working on and what you've been working on um we won't we certainly won't start there there's plenty of stuff um to start with I wanted to start by ask asking so you know I was as I was saying sort of in the introduction one of the things that one of the many remarkable things about this novel is this sort of this kind of this range of voices this weave of voices and I'm curious if we can start just um just with that as I was reading the novel again one of the great things you and I talked about this novel a few times and each time we do I reread the novel so you know you know so as I was reading rereading the novel for this conversation I was struck by the kind of assurance of the finished product in a sense of how you know the build of the narrative through this this this weave of voices um I know it didn't start that way and so I wondered if we can go back to the beginning and talk about how you you know how the novel developed and how you came to this kind of structural conceit no I think this is a really good a really good question I think it's sometimes it's very hard when you look What inspired you to write this book at a book as a like a physical object and you know looking at it and thinking you know you might think that started out like that but sometimes the the the first draft and what you actually find as a finished book can be so different and that certainly was the case with this particular book for me it started out in the summer of 2014 I had turned in uh the copy edits for the Moors account and I was looking casting about for ideas for my next one and I and I actually wrote something like 70 pages of a spe cative novel which is the one that I'm working on now and cast and set it aside because it wasn't going anywhere and just was you know just wasn't sure what to write about next I just wasn't inspired and then then we happened to be on vacation I happened to be getting a phone call telling me that you know family member was sick and it just kind of got me thinking about you know how difficult um it can be to live aart from you know from members of your family I know during the pandemic everybody had that experience right where say grandma is sick or your dad is sick or your mom is sick and there's you can't visit them you can't just drop everything and go just because you're physically unable to and that very much is the experience of being an immigrant you live in one country your family lives in another and that physical proximity is missing and that just complicates life you know in small ways but also in very large ways and so I thought oh it would be interesting to write about this feeling because this is something that I deal with all the time um and and to sort of explore what it does to a person after a certain number of years so I had the idea of writing a novel about a family that is brought together again after the death of the father um and the parents uh immigrated to the US 35 years earlier uh and so when the father passes the family is brought together and then we get to see kind of you know get to spend time with them and see what this decision to immigrate has done to all of them how it has impacted them and as I started writing the book you know I thought okay well you know the death and grief are such heavy subjects it just seemed to me that making it into a mystery and adding that element of spense would keep me interested in in writing and knowing what happened next because I didn't know what would happen next and also I think because of what was going on in the country around that time in 2014 it was something that was very much on my mind sort of the place of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in this country so so that's how all these ideas sort of percolated and um when I started writing I I didn't I didn't want to do a straightforward firstperson narrative because I had spent the previous book I had done one voice and it was you know five years of research it's a historical novel it's a very voicey novel and I I just wanted to to try my hand at doing something else because I get bored very easily and I'm also trying as a writer to sort of learn how to do new things at a technical level um and so I thought okay I'm going to do more than one perspective and in this which I now imagine to be a mystery I will need one voice which is sort of like the detective One Voice which is the daughter who's you know coming back with the family and one um sort of her love interest because I thought you know just again it's sort of like I can't write an entire novel that is all about grief I need something that that that also keeps tenderness in the narrative and so that's where the idea of the Love Story came about and I think initially again in order to sort of stretch my capabilities I had thought of doing this in the third person so I wrote a draft with it it is from their perspectives but it is in the third person um and then I rewrote it uh and I thought okay well now I have I know what happens with all of these characters I know what happens in the story and I turned it into my editor and so this was like after two years of work part of the reason by the way why it had to be a mystery is that like it just takes such a long time or at least it takes me a long time to write a novel that you know you have to be interested you have to care about the characters long enough that you're going to want to spend several years with them um and also don't you think don't you think that all I mean all fiction or all narrative is in its way a mystery Story I mean you know I I mean happens next definitely yeah we're all we're all on the we're all on the trail right you know yes yes absolutely absolutely so so Minor characters anyway so that that was what happened I turned it in and then my editor read it and he's like oh this is great you know we love it and we would be very proud to publish it I just you know have some feedback and it was just like a sort of a question you know what about these minor characters that you've created in a novel and I had created like pretty much it's the exact same book so all of these characters that you now hear about in the the sort of nine characters all of their stories are exactly the same but they were kind of buried um because they were presented in the third person from from these the the the detective the love interest and the and the sister and that created I think a little bit of awkwardness in certain scenes like for example when I was trying to introduce what happened with the witness it was a little bit more complicated because I was you know only in the in the perspective of the detective and I thought well that's an interesting idea um and I know I know that there's something about this novel that doesn't quite work I just don't know what it is so it could be that it's a question of point of view um and so I decided to just try it for 50 pages to try and revise and see if I was interested in writing from these other perspectives and before I even hit page 40 I realized that that was what what what I think the novel was missing at that point is that there was not it was it it didn't have that sort of openness um in bringing in these voices and once I opened it up in that way it just became so much more exciting to write and to revise and I just went away for another couple of years and rewrote it and that's how the the sort of nine perspectives um came about I think I stopped annoying yeah do you think I mean did you get to know those I mean what's fascinating about the book or one of the fascinating things is all those characters are so well drawn even the ones who are minor characters or you know there there are characters who appear to be minor characters who end up becoming kind of major characters or Catalyst characters in a certain way um did you find yourself getting to know those characters better or did you have um a full sense of them when you were you know when you were writing the first version of the book before you activated all those voices oh that's a great question I think I think the the more I stay with a character the more I get to know them better and sometimes in the process of revision that's when I actually um deepen my my exploration of their emotional lives so one of the things that happens is that sometimes I don't quite know why somebody is doing something I it just my intuition tells me that that's what they're doing and I don't quite know and it takes spending time with that revision to to oh wait now now it makes sense now I understand why they're they did this it's because this other thing has happened you know a few years earlier or this is you know so you just the more you spend time with characters the more you get to know them at least that's what that's what happens in my case so I think that they became more complicated once I had them in the first person it allowed me to get to know them better um than when they were minor characters obviously and it complicated the story so much more one of the things that that also this book has made me realize and I know this sounds so simple but like and I and I realize this a lot when I look at at when I read the news too which is that we like to believe that that what we believe or how we look at a situation is the result of careful considerations or the results of our own emotional um sort of perspective and that we wouldn't change our views if we were this other person or if we had a different um upbringing or if we were somebody else like you know because of course our views are completely are completely Mak perfect sense and are perfectly reasonable and that's the only way to look at things right mine mine certainly do that we are right and so and and and I'm just not sure that that's the case like I I'm just really not sure that that any of this is not random and driven by accidents of birth um and accidents of how we have been um brought up that lead us to have these particular perspectives on things and I think one of the great things about um using the first person is and opening the book up in that way is that it really um made it possible to let the readers see all of these different perspectives on what happened with the main character the The Immigrant who dies on the first page of the book so this is no spoiler um and what happened during that hit and run accident and to really form their own opinions and in some ways much more complicated opinions because they get to see everybody else's perspective yeah no that makes sense it this it occurs to me since you bring up what happens on the first page of the book I'm wondering if you might want to read the opening of the novel for U for us because I think it it it it it it it sort of illustrates a lot of what you've just been talking about oh sure um I have it right here so here we go this is from the perspective of Norah uh who is the The Daughter daughter my father was killed on a spring night four years ago while I sat in the corner Booth of a new beastro in Oakland whenever I think about that moment these two contradictory images come to me first my father father struggling for breath on the cracked asphalt and me drinking champagne with my roommate Margo we were celebrating because Margot had received the Grant from the Jerome Foundation to work on a new chamber piece her second big commission that year we'd ordered mul Mah and shared an entree and lingered late into the night the waiter was trying to convince us to get the chocolate mousse for dessert when my phone rang I have no clear memory of what happened next I must have told Margo the news we must have paid the bill put on our coats walked the five blocks back to our apartment a bag was packed somehow but I do remember driving home on the five freeway in the foggy darkness that cloaked almond Groves and orange Orchards all the while dreaming up alternate explanations perhaps the sheriff's department had misidentified the body or the hospital had swapped my father's records with someone else's these possibilities were far-fetched I knew and yet I clung to them as I drove under my headlights I could see only 20 ft ahead but the fog lifted at dawn and by the time I reached the Mojave the sun was out and the sky the Brazen blue all I could hear when I stepped into my parents house were my heels on the travertine floor there was a copy of Reader's Digest on the console a set of keys on a yellow wrist coil and a pair of sunglasses with a missing lens one of the framed photos on the hallway wall was a skew in the living room my mother sat on the sofa staring at the cordless phone in her hand as though she couldn't remember how to use it mom I called but she didn't look up it was as if she couldn't hear me she was still in the white shirt and black ghee from her kateed class the night before across the ottoman the jacket of her uniform lay in a heap the dragon applique on its back a startling red it seemed to me then that my father was still with us in the half empty packet of maros on the window sill the freight slippers under the coffee table the tooth marks on the pencil that stuck out from the book of crossword puzzles any moment now he would walk in smelling of coffee and hamburgers saying you won't believe what a customer told me this morning and then seeing me standing by the armchair call out Nora when did you get here his arms would his eyes would gleam with the light he would kiss me on the cheeks the stubble on his chin would tickle me and I would say now I just got here now but the doorway remained empty and pain kicked me in the stomach thank you that was beautiful um it raises well first of all it sets up so many of the tensions in conflicts in this novel just in those couple of paragraphs I'm curi you know it reminds me of something that you wrote about in one of the essays in conditional citizens where you talk about um your grandmother and how you realized at a certain point when you were young that your education and the way you were being raised was taking you away from her and not necessarily emotionally but in terms of of um of intellectual possibilities in terms of class and those kind of things and it's it's interesting because I feel a similar undertone you have Nora you know as the father is is being hit in the hit and run coming out of the the diner that he is that that supports the family Nora's up in the Bay Area she's out with a friend they're both composers they're celebrating a you know a commission and it really does kind of illustrate vividly the sort of of the the the two worlds in a certain sense and the idea that the family aspiration is to in allow access for her to those or to create access to Norah but that same access also um provides a creates complications for the family yeah absolutely we can talk a little bit about that as a dynamic yeah Displacement I you know this is interesting I was talking to my husband about this a couple of months ago I was telling him that in some ways you know when the book came out I you know and I started talking about it I was I was talking about the the sort of coincidence about the the fact that every character in this novel and not by Design this happened sort of in an organic way I didn't even realize it until later is um has has this experience of displacement right so of course Anora is somebody who has left her hometown and lives in in another part of the state the parents are immigrants the witness is an undocumented immigrant the detective used to work in DC is now working in in this small town so pretty much everybody has had an experience of displacement and so when when when people were talking about the novel oftentimes it would be this idea of displacement and immigration and it really took me a while to realize that the book really in a way is really about this experience that you that you just brought up which is how it's it's not it's not just a question of alienation but it's also the guilt that comes with it this this um you know like you feel it in the first paragraph where there's this this this sense of guilt really that the daughter is is out celebrating with her friend but in fact it's at that precise moment that the father is is is um is the victim of the Hidden run and so all the characters really are dealing with with that guilt too so for example the the just off the top of my head the witness who who um who doesn't come forward because he's afraid of and reasonably so of of law enforcement there is also a sense of guilt with that and he's trying to you know it's really Weighing on him uh and it's and it's throughout the book He's some it's something that he's wrestling with should I come forward should I say something or should I not say something and and the wife is the one that keeps bringing it up to him and and in a sense making that guilt worse and that's something and again the Jeremy the the sort of vet is dealing with this sort of guilt about things that that that um he's experienced and things that he's done uh when he was in combat so it is something that I think the book um explores and and that that sometimes you think that you're doing something that that is um that that that is a positive in your life like for example you know moving to another country but it does come at a cost and that creates that feeling of of guilt that I think that the book is exploring and certainly in my own life this is something that I've wrestled with as you brought up you know with my grandmother my grandmother was somebody that I was very very close with because um the school that I went to which was the French school that I that that that I went to as a as a young child was near her house and so I ended up spending all my school day you know every day with her um and I would eat my lunch at her house and spent a lot of time with her but my grandmother was also illiterate and so she was somebody that you know the more the more I spent time at school the more I became educated the further apart we were intellectually and there was a sense of you know like yes of course I feel that my education has been a gift for me but at the same time it has also taken me away from that route from those roots and that that is something that there's nothing I can do about and there is a sense of guilt with that I think as well yeah I mean you know it's interesting too that there's also displacement even within the families you know for instance um uh the the the police the police officer Coleman is you know she's married to someone she's raising his son as her own but she's not the mo she's not the biological mother although she has been raising this child since he was young but she's acutely aware of that and he's an adolescent now and there's a moment where he says to her um this is not really a spoiler but where he says to you're not you're not my mother and you know she feels it like a knife in the chest or the witness Ephraim who is also in a in a related situation he you know he first met his wife when she was a widow so there is even Within These constell and of course which I do want to talk about but I want to in a minute I want to bring Dany out but you know the relationship between Nora and her sister um you know there's all kinds of movements of displacement even Within These overlapping nuclear families very much yes yes I agree so let's bring out um about half we're about 5:30 now so let's bring uh let's bring out our our our guest the guest for today is uh is Dany Senna um who's joining us from Los Angeles Dany is a professor at USC author of um new people caucasia and has a novel coming out this summer color ision um I'm going to disappear for about 10 minutes while you all talk but I'll be e dropping so I can make sure I I'm up to speed on the conversation welcome Dany thank you I'm so thrilled to be Interview here with Leila um hi ncy and we're friends and have seen each other in many different places um New York Vermont um CAG right right I was like remembering all the places I've seen you and um also just remembering the first time I read this book which was as a judge on the national book awards that's great I was the chair of the judges in the fiction category and all of us at the moment we were reading this book um we had read like I don't know 75 books before this um and it was very hard to enjoy reading at that point and I picked up your book in my state of kind of exhaustion and why did I take on this role doing this literary citizenship thing and um started to read it and I was like wait a minute I'm happy again I'm submerged in this story and um I just it was such a a profound and um beautiful beautifully written book I I so admire in all of your books like your control your elegance um your attention to detail and language but also um how much that control hides a lot of heat under the surface and and the sort of the more controlled and beautiful it feels the more I feel this heat rising and it's just this amazing feet in your work um and in this book in particular um I was so interested in um what I saw as a kind of radical pluralism in this book that is something that felt like this antidote to the culture we're living in um and I was just you know I was thinking even about like have you ever seen uh Anna deir Smith's um fires in the mirror um her plays where she takes on all these characters and voices and and it's almost like an acting you know she's an actress and a playwright yeah is it the one that was on HBO a few years ago right was it on she's done a couple one was about the LA riots and one was about the Crown Heights riots and um and so I was just interested in how you in all of these voices and the sort of this how do you do this shapeshifting as a fiction writer like do you do you feel that you're more one character than the other like how does this is it like method acting are you kind of inhabiting each of these voices and finding where you connect to them like I usually write from characters who look and share a lot of sort of traits with myself but it's not always the character I relate to the most is the one that looks the most like me um and people assume it is so I'm just curious about that process of of this radical pluralism and how you pull it off yeah Radical Pluralism yeah it's interesting that that that that you call it radical pluralism I I you know I I just I kept thinking about how um when when when when people when people write these like sort of immigrant stories it's it's often in these kind of like massive big cities right like Los Angeles or New York or whatever and I and I just kept coming back you know how when you're on the Central Valley and you're like driving on the five and you see those signs like sometimes you'll see a sign and it'll be like in Punjabi because there's a community there around the five or whatever and I I've always thought like small towns would be a good like it it's it's such a great place to set a story about an immigrant family and and as I kept thinking about that like we think about just think about like the idea of small towns in the popular imagination as a place that are places that are sort of closed in on themselves and remote and Rural and and filled with um you know people who may be closed mind and you know all these ideas that people have about small towns and I I thought it would be interesting to play with that because that's not been my experience with small towns but of course the problem is that the challenge is how to write these characters who may be different and I think that the way that I approached it with this book is for some of the characters it was easy enough to find an entry point so for example the mother who is an immigrant to the United States and I'm an immigrant she's an older woman an older person you know it was you know it's easier to have the sort of when you have like um like certain identity certain identities in common and I'm like I kind of know what she's going through because I've been through something like that so I can use that as an entry point but that's all it is is it's an entry point and the rest of it I mean you still have to create the rest of the characters still have to see how she and she's not me and I'm not her and I still you know like still have to use my imagination to kind of create this character um so it could be that that it is this sort of uh similar identity but in other cases it can just be because this is a character that I'm just deeply interested in so for example the question of of the vet you know I remember when the Iraq War started I remember you know the marches in fact just on online today I saw that it was the 20th anniversary of the marches of the anti-iraq wars from March 20th 20 2003 that we were all marching in and and um it's just it was a war that I just was obsessed with and followed very very very closely and just read so much about it that I felt like this is some this is this is the a character that I think I can write just because I feel so connected to to the experience that or at least to the intellectual experience of it not the physical one because I know nothing about weapons or anything like that I had to educate myself about the book so in that case it was sort of like you know a personal interest in in in the character but in in another case it could just be I kind of know how this character sounds I kind of know how they talk so then it becomes the language that's an entry point so in each case it's just a question of I guess with this book it was a question of finding um a place to start and once I started and through draft after draft and waiting and being patient with each character until um until it got built it wasn't I think as I was telling David earlier it's it's like sometimes when we look at finished books we get so overwhelmed like how do you do something like that but it's you know it's just day after day you know by spending time with the character and then paragraph by paragraph and sense by sense God the patience it takes to be a Other novelist I know that we do this to ourselves slow cooker um yes um I was and I was also looking back at it in the last few days looking back at the novel and I I was struck by the the term other in the title and um and I was it was resonating with me in a very specific way because I grew up biracial in the 1970s and every form I got you know you had to pick a race and I'm half black and half white and um you were not allowed to pick two you had to pick one and and the only other option was to pick other and I was thinking of that when I was looking at the title of this book and thinking about um that kind of um dismissiveness of the word other and the Eraser of it and how your title plays with that and I was thinking about what it is to be um someone who doesn't fit into the binary of American race for you and for me and um how you were exploring that in some ways um in this book or how did the word other kind of land with you or where did you find that word in your imagination well the original title of the book was something like the king of all things which is a very pompous title and it was it was from a from like I think it was from heraclitus or something I don't know it was it sounded good at the time and then I was like what am I doing you know this this doesn't quite fit what I'm trying to do and and I tried to come up with a title that would sort of encapsulate something about the book like something true about it and and I kept coming back to this idea of alienation that each of the character experiences and the thing about it is that oftentimes you can carry these feelings of alienation even if outwardly people might think well this person feels that they're alienated well that's not you know I wouldn't have expected that but none of us know what's going on inside the emotional you know that like inside other people like they may have these feelings and and [Music] um and just have no you don't necessarily Express them and so I I I thought that this that that the title that using the word other with the word American and putting them together would be would kind of get this idea of alienation but but to your point about other on the census I remember being mystified by that when I came to the US at USC and I was a graduate student and I had to fill those forms and I found them soing I put other I mean what was I supposed to put I because you couldn't because I mean it was just very confusing the whole thing the whole idea that you identity I mean that's one of those things that the census shows its confusion about like like my category or categories like there's a real confusion about where to place you and what are you you know um and then we're living in this moment of course right now where all of that has been kind of islamophobia hatred of Arabs Muslims um and the the moment we're living in we're we're suddenly identity which has been you know it kind of like the hatred goes into missions and then it comes out to the surface in these moments um and I'm just like you were kind of writing about that in this book you know yeah but then we're living in a moment again where it felt so viscerally right yeah yeah there was maybe it was like a couple of weeks ago the New York Times did a huge piece about AR Americans and the census because the census considers Arab Americans as white and then the New York Times went and ask actual Arab Americans and showed the racial diversity of the arab-american community you know going from Sudan all the way to Morocco right and so like they did you know and of course you know nobody everybody was confused some people were checking white some people were checking others some people were checking black it was like all over the place and this would be fixed if the census had a box for that and then allowed people to write or or or specify but in any case um yeah it's it's this this idea that you bring up this was something that I very specifically wanted to write about in the book which is that people can can seem absolutely you know just lovely and warm and friendly and everything is great and then all of a sudden something comes out of their mouth that you you just you you're like stunned you're like wait did I hear that right yeah and and that that casual casual um otherization or racism towards others but like just any like just that I wanted to capture in the book uh in the way that the older man speaks in the way that um AJ speaks like you know something that makes you think wait did I like sometimes like some of the stuff that you hear you you think maybe I'm misheard or you know like you start to Gaslight yourself because it seems so insane what people I absolutely wanted to write about that yeah no and it comes across so powerfully and I also you know you're Geography also a professor of writing and actually it looks like I have to um wrap things up okay I was just gonna say d Dany finish this do this question and then we'll because I'm actually really curious about this so I didn't mean to I'm not bigfooting so about um the role of geography and place in this and um it felt so much like you know it could not have been been told in any other place but California Southern California the desert um and that was part of its beauty is how much you get to even the fact of him being killed by a car like this is the The Perfect Crime for this place and the alienation the sense of everybody rushing and moving and yeah separate by these vehicles and um I was just interested in in like the role of geography in your process and and also in your teaching like with your students who are always on their phones and who don't really live anywhere like do they have a sense of geography anymore and how important is that it to you in the fictional process it's super important like the setting is like crucial to me when I try to sort of like uh uh uh start a story and the as with every novel you know like every decision that you make is not just for one reason it's like there's four or five reasons why it can only be this and part of their so I wanted it to be a small town and this because obviously I was interested in small towns but also because just at a very pragmatic level if it's a hitandrun accident I couldn't really have it be in a big town because there's surveillance cameras everywhere so it needed to be a small town so the desert was perfect for that and then personally the desert was a place that I started to go to like I had lived in California for or in La for 20 years without ever having set foot in the desert then once I did I just fell in love with the landscape I which came as a surprise to me because I've always lived in like these huge cities and I never you know I I I've never been outside of big cities so it was really I just fell in love with it with the Silence with the Peace of of the desert with the landscape with the fact that there are actually Four Seasons if you know how to pay attention um and um so I wanted to set it just because I love the landscape and I wanted to be able to write about it um and then I thought also for Moroccan immigrants it was something I could use U and kind of place them there so there were multiple reasons why the desert and it it it it it was it was a huge part of writing the book being able to write about an area that I loved um and then and I don't know if I answered your question but that's perfect and I could I'll have to get together with you and ask you we'll have a long conversation but you want to stay on and we can just all and the three of us can talk or we AJ can do that sure okay so um so I want to I want to come back to this question of what what you were calling Dany radical pluralism which I really like I was thinking as kind of radical empathy which is coming back to that question of these voices a character like AJ there is a question in the chat uh or question somewhere um about AJ someone wants to speak about how you came to AJ's character on the first read through he didn't really catch uh this reader this this person's attention um but on the second reading he was a very interesting character I think about AJ a lot as almost the Exemplar in this novel of um of that kind of radical humanism or pluralism or or empathy because he's the character without without giving too much away he is the character he doesn't speak in his own voice for two thirds of the novel really he comes in you know about 100 page about 175 pages in but he's the character who I I as a reader I'm most inclined to make um a negative knee-jerk reaction about but once we get into his voice and his story regardless of you know my antipathy he becomes this dimensionalized human being who has his own traumas and tragedies that have been heavily influential in sort of the way that that he turns out so I wonder if we can if we can talk a little bit about both his Genesis and also his his role in in the way the novel develops yeah this is a a really good question I think it it came about I really hesitated to write from his perspective but then I really thought about what the book was trying to do which is to sort of open up um uh the perspective to all these different characters that are all Belong To That All belong to this small town to this community and I thought okay communities are not made up of people that agree with each other on everything right that or that or that that they're not made of people who are all the same they're by necessity going to be diverse places in all kinds of ways and ways that you might like and ways that you might not like and if that's the case how could I be writing this book without also having space for this guy who I wouldn't particularly want to know but but it he is part of this story and so then I faced the task of having to um put him into the story and since the story is All in the first person that meant writing about him in the first person and that was a challenge and I think the way that I handled it was to as you say bring him in a little bit later and just enough that that we kind of get a sense of who he is the the the the kind of relationship that he has with Nora um the kind of relationship that he has with his parents so we get to know him a little bit but he's not like a central character but he is a part of the story because I did feel that um he was a member of that Community he was a member of that small town so therefore he he there was space for him to even if we don't um even if he's the kind of person who will say the things that that and I were talking about earlier but but he says the quiet part out loud that's his I Selma mean another character who operates that way too is is the sister is Selma who comes you know who we see but we see always through a perspective someone else's perspective and interestingly stylistically when she has her there's the one chapter where we get her perspective that's the chapter you you chose to write in second person and I wonder if you can talk about that as a decision um also yeah well this was just sort of one of those times you know like you know how I was mentioning earlier when you start writing and you don't necessarily know why you're doing something but you do it because it seems like it's fun and so so with this fun that comes into play when you're famar that part sometimes and so with her you know it was you know because the other the the mother and the father and the sister were in it just seemed to make sense to include her as well can you hear me I feel like the sound came in and out maybe I shouldn't be playing you're um and and so um yeah so I wanted to to include her in the story but because she was somebody who seemed to have like this everything that that Nora doesn't have like she seems to have her act together she seems to have like her life like the sort of picture perfect life and and so you know when I decided to write her thought oh it might be interesting to try it this way and then I tried it that way in the second person and I just had fun doing it and so that that was really the short answer is it was fun writing her um and then later I mean I can definitely post explain why it's in the second person but in the moment I did it because it was fun and then sort of the more clever explanation is that because she is somebody who in some sense is also alienated with herself and she develops substance abuse problem and and um she she has she has an experience of immigration that is radically different from that of her parents uh and a different experience of alienation than her sister and I think that that um the second person really fits for that there is a sense of alienation from the self in her case well she says in the moment it was fun it's so interesting hearing like that as your process because I always think that my subconscious knows more than I do when I'm writing fiction absolutely so you make a decision like that because you're just sort of feeling it and later you can see the logic but it's you kind of don't want to almost know too much right you know you know uh Ray Bradberry I think it was Ray Bradberry who had this quote he says your intuition knows what it's doing so get out of the way and I this is what I needed to here and so I tipped it above my desk so often times you know it's and it's absolutely true you know if you think about it in a way it's almost like dream language you know how like in a dream things seem to have their own logic like you're dreaming that you're flying but it's on like you know the co-pilot is this person you haven't seen in 30 years and like there's a particular logic in the dream and in in writing if we trust that that it there is a logic to it eventually you know the the sort of more right brain part of it will catch up with it I love that that's really um that's fascinating I I you know the other thing Jeremy and Nora too that I wanted to ask about is this idea be it's not just the perspectives I mean Jeremy the vet is a is a is a great example you know he's got his own articulated backstory all these reasons he's done what he's done he was he is a veteran of the war um and Nora as they kind of are together um she's her Rea you know it like I I feel like we're a little bit more sympathetic to him than Nora is which then makes me more sympathetic to both of them in a certain sense you know what I mean and there's just a fascinating set of Dynamics going on in there I find myself sometimes thinking you know thinking in her reaction to his stories about being in Iraq um I I you know I sort of of end up saying like give him a little bit of give him a little bit of a break he was in the war zone but then I also identify with hers because I'm much more aligned with her you know politically culturally socially so it causes me to ask questions of myself about my own kind of what you were saying before my own you know all the values that I'm so so sure about and all the the ideas that I'm I'm so sure about so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that because it isn't it isn't just when they're the first person character it's also when they're the third person character that the first person characters is is talking about yeah yeah I think this is something that um that I think I just encountered in my own experience I me you remember how earlier I said that I was obsessed with this war and so I I just was extremely passionate about it and I felt like a great crime had been committed you know and that we would live um with its consequences for Generations like I remember in 2003 I'm like there is going to like the outcome of this is going to be potentially a radical islamist party that comes out of what's going on in Iraq and then of course eventually 10 years later that's that's what happened but anyway um and I'm just an idiot with a laptop so it's you know it's like the idea that people that the people who were starting this didn't realize that it could have these grip consequences is is ludicrous to me um and so but on the other hand once I get off my high horse I realize that [Music] um that a lot of the people who are that were involved in it are just in the end they're just people and and life is complicated in all sorts of ways and um it's when when we or at least when I look at how these events are are unfold I can exercise a kind of um intellectual judgment on it and I certainly do every day but then when I look at what people are experiencing it's so much more complicated and harder to do that it's so much more um difficult to say that that everybody else is seeing it the same way and everybody else has the same sense that this is right and this is wrong people are just um there's so much chaos in life there's so much um complication to people's lives and that had to be rendered in in for me through this character um and just to your question David this is also something that that has come up in um like when I've done for example book club events with young college students that something that they asked me about uh you know why why are they you know getting together like why would she you know like they want them to stay separate it can't it can't like like you know there's no um sense that maybe people [Music] um can find Common Ground like not necessarily agree with each other but that they realize that each other may have made mistakes in the past um and because and shame is such a universal feeling right like everyone has felt shame so of course we can all relate to that if we get past all that language yeah right yeah but also we're inside their I mean you know we're inside their heads we're inside their hearts right we're inside their souls we're reading their first person account so it feels like again it comes back to that question of pluralism or or empathy we know them better let's say than the people they're in the room with may know them because we're hearing the inner we're we're exposed to the inner lives of all these characters right right right what about the presence of um the father's voice so the book begins as we know from the reading with his his death is in the first you know sentence first sentence of of the book um there are a number of passages where he essentially comes back to speak I don't know how else to put it to speak from from beyond the grave and which I love is an idea you know like that's my great fantasy in life is to be able to speak from people grave I'm curious about that too as a kind of it's a I mean it's a it's a terrific narrative device um and I ha and I hesitate to kind of make too schematic your creative decisions but I'm wondering about how that evolved and um and how it be first how it how you first identified it as useful I think it's really really useful narratively you know again it was one of those things that you know how I said earlier that I was rewriting and then before hit page 50 I was like okay this this this is much more fun much more alive much more full of energy uh this character was one of the ones that I had tried to write and again because it seemed like it'd be interesting to do it why don't I just try it and I tried it and I was like you know I know it's kind of weird that he's said but I kind of like it and so I I I just went with it and I've been asked you know how does that work I'm like it's fiction I um I get to that and um yeah yeah I go ahead sorry no I was just going to say it was it it was something that I thought um would add something to the story that that not including him it just so basically the question was should he be a first person character should he be one of the ones that I include in this story or should he not and I just felt like his presence added so much to the story and it just made it much more um complicated and um it just opened such a window into their lives that the other that the sister and the mother and the daughter didn't know but the reader gets to know um and I really very much like that and so that was why included him so this is for both of you in some way because this is a question concerned I mean it's it's it's definitely something that I think about in terms of this novel but I think about it a lot in terms of fiction like time is all you know there's so many different registers of time in this novel you know we're back in um in Morocco in in the ear late 70s and early 80s um where the parents are political radicals where you know we're in we have dzz sort of narrating his own experience from Beyond the Grave we have the bulk of this unfolds in 2014 but there is you know there there's a of characters looking back when you first introduce the detective she's thinking back on this case as it's something that had happened you know four years or so in the past um so you know for this novel I'm curious about your your sense of the movement of time or how that developed but um but I for both of you as novelists I'm really interested in the notion of how time within the novel gets activated as a narrative as a narrative mechanism can what you mean can you can I mean you know we're we're moving back we've got memory we've got ger we've got memories of Iraq we've got the father speaking for himself we've got the mother remembering um what happened uh you know in um in Casablanca we've got you know right all we have this being written retrospectively in a certain sense or narrated effectively by the characters but in fact there is that that ticking clock of the mystery so it's also moving forward in time even as it's looking back in time does that is that clear yes yes this is a central question and it's actually a central question in every novel is like how do you how do you pick the sort of like starting point and how far away you are from um the moment of narration versus the moment of the event and one of the things I wanted to do is have a narrator that had just enough perspective on the event because it's the events are narrated in the past tense so when when the novel opens we find out that this happened four years ago and the reason I did this is um I wanted my characters to have a little bit of perspective a a little bit of time in which to sort of interpret these events and put them within the context of their own lives this book that I'm working on right now is is actually in the present tense so the character has no time like the the character is is experiencing the event and has no time to spend um contextualizing them in the past like they're too busy experience and what's going on and so it's a completely different form of narration but with this one I wanted it because also because it was all these different perspectives that it would be something that had happened in the past that they all got to um reflect upon because don't forget also that immigration is one of those things that that sort of splits time right you're constantly thinking about that other country and therefore about a place that you no longer live in that exists solely in the past for you um so it just it for that reason alone The Narrative have the the the moment of narration had to had to be a few years after the the timeline of the event do you also feel like um sorry go ahead no no no I was gonna say I was curious how you you were doing it well I was curious because the book you wrote the book or started it in 2018 did you came out 14 it came out in 2019 okay right so it you feel that you have to have um years away from a historical event to be able to write about it it you know do you also as the writer have to have that kind of temporal distance from a moment um like the time period that you're writing about no I I think it's something that it just really depends on on the book right so so with with um with the mors account for example which is the novel before this one it is also a book where the main character is talking about that had hap that have happened a few years earlier so almost 10 years earlier and part of the reason for doing it that way is to be able to um uh create this this um fiction that he is sort of correcting the historical record like he can't correct the historical record unless he knows what actually happened and so that's why he needed the perspective of that you know the 10 years so that was sort of the reason for that and with this one as I said it was you know because it is a mystery and it is going to be revealed but it is going to be revealed peace meal and so instead of it being um um experienced in the present it's experienced in the past so it's I I I wanted them to have time to to narrate because it's also like why are they narrating this story right like they're talking about their experiences of this hid and run let's imagine that for example they're all being asked for whatever reason to talk about this this guy that they knew five years ago and then everybody starts that narration about something that happened five years ago but but with this new one that I'm working on it's it's in the present tense so there's not that advantage of time and it is it is a headache because that's a much it's a completely different way of of doing things there is no there is no the the the the character does not know more like the reader and the and the character know about the same if that makes sense yeah it's almost like more filmic like you're in a yes in this new one but but with the in your new yes yeah right but I was just thinking about like you know 911 and the Iraq War and how people were writing novels the year after 9/11 and then they were writing about the Iraq war novels were coming out like that year and I was like have we had time to process this you know what I mean like I think we don't even know the full story when it happened last year and what you were saying about like we're going to be paying the cost for this for decades and so you wrote it at a time when you could see that cost already yeah yeah yeah it was far enough in the in the distance that you could see the sort of waves of trauma and consequence right yeah it's funny because when the book came out so so I started working on the book in 2014 and then the book came out in 2019 and one of the first questions I got asked is like is this about Trump I'm like he wasn't I wasn't even aware right right 2014 but it there is that there is that that lineage there I mean you know it's I mean we could we could trace um we could trace a line from 2003 to 2016 of course yeah um this has been a fascinating conversation unfortunately we are out of time I've got you know we made it through about 20% of my questions so um you m too the extended dance remix but um but I want to thank um I want to thank uh leel La Lami both for This Magnificent novel and for um for being here and your your generosity in this interview and Dany Senna thank you for being um a part of it too thanks to everybody who was here bring um I'm gonna bring my my friend and colleague blae back on to take us out um but thank you all for being here and um thank you here's blae thank you so much wow thank you you everyone thank thank you Lila Dany and David what an extraordinary evening um as uh earlier uh the pro tonight's program will be recorded and it will be up on californi book club.com uh either very late tonight or first thing in the morning uh and everyone who attended tonight's uh program will receive a thank you note in tomorrow's email with links to all of the cool and Brilliant things that were discussed uh tonight uh and be sure to join us next month please um or on April 18th uh we'll be discussing uh Jessica hagedorn's amazing novel The Gangster of Love uh and then in may we will uh be joined with uh by a claim poet Gary Snider um the practice of the wild and also RI rap uh two two books for the price of one evening um and and don't forget please the special offer and I'm not kidding you know $50 to receive the all access to print and online our award-winning quarterly um as well as get a telep book club Hat show the world what a good little reader we all are and uh as well as the best bookstore Guide to the bookstores in California West I can't find it somewhere on my desk uh so thank you for very with me on that or again just come to the site and sign up for $3 a month please um and finally we're just grateful that you're here tonight with us it's always wonderful to see people U coming in from as far away as Houston Hong Kong and Brooklyn and Morocco um so shout out to you all uh at the end uh of the when I stop speaking there'll be a one minute survey that that pops up i' really appreciate it if you could fill out those questions thanks again and we'll see you next time take care everybody