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At age six, there was Bradley with freckles and a voice oddly raspy for his age, the same as mine. A witty boy who laughed a lot; his freckles glowed with humor. We walked to school together holding hands. He grew up to manage a Las Vegas casino and, as rumor had it, dealt drugs on the side. Not suitable at all for the long haul. I can see us hand in hand, walking down East New York Avenue, looking both ways at every corner, finally making it to the schoolyard and running to our respective lines. This was true love. Our romance was brief, but all the years through high school, when we met in the halls, we greeted each other warmly, ripples of memory passing between us.

The next was a girl, Paula. I was nine. It was her name that drew me, exotic, so different from the names of my daily friends, the Barbaras, Carols, Judys and Susans of Brooklyn. Paula came from afar, somewhere upstate, and visited her aunt and uncle across the street during school vacations. Distance, too, was exotic. There was little distance in Brooklyn, the outer or inner sort. I always craved the exotic; my father mocked me when I used the word. Also exotic was Paula’s skin, not black, that wouldn’t have been possible on our block back then, but brown like a Native American or a Mexican although she was neither, most likely descended from Sephardic Jews of the Middle East. I waited eagerly for my mother to announce, Paula’s here. I rushed across the street to ring her bell. I didn’t know then that I was in love.

I picture her sitting on my bed, both of us cross-legged, playing cards or playing with dolls or simply talking about whatever nine-year-olds talk about. After a year or so, she stopped coming. Paula, wherever you are, I missed you so.

Thirteen, a bad year for any girl. We summered in the Catskills, a site of torpor worse even than Brooklyn, and shared a wall and porch with the family next door. The two sons, sixteen and nineteen, worked in the day camp. It was the older boy I mooned over, as girls often fix on the unattainable. He was large and dark (dark like Paula), with black hair in a crew cut, a handsome beefy face, good-natured, unmarred by thought or introspection. He walked around in bathing trunks, making it easy for me to admire his tanned body and hairy legs. For some forgotten reason he called me Tex; I thrilled to the name. One day I sat on my porch in my bathing suit, holding my towel, hoping he would appear. And, miracle, his screen door opened and out he came in his trunks, carrying a towel. Hi, Tex. His voice sliced a path through my innards. I remember the slicing feeling to this day. Going to the pool? I nodded. Me too, he said. Walk with me. Indescribable joy, walking down the dirt road with Lenny, hoping ardently that my friends would see us. It was almost like a date. I dreamed that from then on we’d be a couple, like the many transient couples the summer shaped—only coupledom could ease the smothering dullness—those little loves that ended at Labor Day. But when we reached the pool, he joined his friends and I joined mine. I’d been imagining some horseplay in the water, maybe with a ball.

I relived that five-minute walk all through the summer and the deadly fall. Some years later I married a boy, not my preferred dark or brawny. I loved him anyway. I imagined he was taller than he was. We talked on the phone at night for hours, I in my older sister’s bedroom I’d inherited when she left to get married, as every girl had to do. I was amazed to find a boy who could actually talk and who read books. I didn’t realize till later that such boys were plentiful if you had the patience to wait and knew where to look. It was like buying the first house that you see, and sometimes that works out quite well. I love him but as we grow old I wonder how I could have plunged so thoughtlessly, blind-eyed, into the future with a stranger.

I’d been getting my short stories published in little magazines for many years, but friends would invariably ask, “When are you going to write that novel?” as if it was an errand I had simply forgotten, as if it was a suit I needed to pick up at the dry cleaner.  Alice Munro, by the way, was still fielding this question when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013!  I mentioned Ms. Munro’s name a lot when this issue came up.  If she could take it, then so could I.  In fact, I had written a novel some years back, a still unpublished one, a family saga set mostly in Iceland.  But even as I was writing it, I considered myself a short story writer attempting a novel, rather than the other way around.  I was probably getting too bogged down in labels, but luckily it didn’t impact my process — if that’s the word for it.  I don’t have the most conventional background for a fiction writer, at least if you look at the author bios in the lit mags where I’ve been published.  Meaning that I don’t have an MFA or teach anywhere and my jobs have never been specifically in the literary field.  However, I had been lucky enough to have signed with an encouraging agent and to possess enough energy and persistence to write at all hours, which quite often means in the middle of the night.  As for the novel vs. short story question, I honestly didn’t set out to write a novel.  Underburn started as a text.  I have close friends in California who tragically lost their home to a wildfire in 2018.  They had moved in with family temporarily.  It was a terribly sad time, but rather heroically they were trying to find some humor in their living situation ― landing with elderly parents who were somewhat challenging and set in their ways.   They told me a couple of funny stories, so I turned one of them into a microfiction piece and sent it to them as a text.  I think they were amused.  Around this same time, I had stumbled upon Nancy Sinatra from 1966, singing her hit, These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ on YouTube with some backup dancers.  I started wondering about those dancers and the lives they have led since that performance (I think about movie extras too!) and how one of them just might have been impacted by a wildfire all these years later.  That gave me Iris, my first character, and got the plot moving.  I was drawn to the idea of the past intruding on all the characters in this story and of having the action take place on both coasts.  Still, as I began writing it, I thought it would end up being a short story . . . and then a long story . . . and then a novella.  Truth be told, the characters just kept speaking to me, as pretentious as that might sound.  I knew it was turning into a novel when I started dreaming about them, when they started debating me in my sleep, and joking around, like we’d known each other forever.  The characters would pop into my head during lockdown Zoom meetings and while I was doing the laundry.  I took a lot of notes.  I’ve written stories that were difficult for me from a technical standpoint or an emotional one, however, Underburn was the most joyful of my writing experiences.  I was so grateful to lose sleep over it.  I still think about the characters, living independently, now that they have moved on without me. I catch myself wondering how they’ve managed during the pandemic, or how they’re making ends meet.  I am absolutely thrilled to see Underburn find a home at Delphinium, and for me to finally publish that novel.  Ultimately, though, it comes back to the work itself, however you choose to categorize it, and the idea of putting something out in the world that hasn’t existed before.

 

 

In the spring of 2018, as I was finishing the second year of my three-year MFA program, I came into the office of my graduate advisor and said, “For my thesis, I’d like to write a book about growing up in Soviet Russia and being an immigrant in America. Obviously, it’ll be informed by my own experience, but do you think I should make it fiction or nonfiction?”

“That’s easy,” my advisor said. “Definitely nonfiction. You have an interesting story to tell, and memoirs sell really well these days.”

It did sound pretty easy: You tell the story you already know the way you remember it, no research required, and voila—a memoir! My first book had been a biography, so I told myself I knew what I was doing. I began to outline, to write the first scenes, and immediately ran into a problem. Or rather, problems.

For one, writing a memoir is not like spilling your guts out in a therapy session. To make a book, the long, twisty, messy, connection- and contradiction-packed story we call life requires a kind of culling that will yield a dynamic, digestible plot, but when the story is yours, it’s hard to cull. Everything seems important. Everything that’s ever happened has culminated in what you are.

For two, memory—at least, my memory—is not only fickle but full of gaps, and mine was lacking quite a few crucial “plot points.” Clearly, research would be required, some of it involving interviews: with the people in my life (who may or may not be thrilled by the idea) and with the people who are no longer in my life (whom I may or may not be able to find).

It was contemplating those interviews that made me realize there existed a problem number three, and it was a doozy: How do I portray other people, real people, in a real way, without hurting, distorting, or offending them? When I put a sliver of somebody else’s messy story on the page alongside mine, will I be inevitably unfair to them? Will I by default simplify them? Will I have to—deliberately or not—reveal secrets others would rather keep hidden?

Of course, authors do this all the time. Memoirists paint their companions, friends, and enemies with ruthless color and merciless perspective. But only having plunged into my own memoir did I realize that the process requires courage, a nuanced navigation of relationships, and running the risk of destroying those relationships. It became quickly apparent to me that I didn’t have this sort of courage, and so, The Light of Seven Days was born: a novel about a woman who is not at all like me, yet whose story shares with mine everything important.

A friend once jokingly suggested that I should put a standard disclaimer at the front of the book: This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. This would not, however, be true. While all my characters are fictional, some of them are based, to a greater or lesser degree, on the actual persons I’ve encountered, loved, detested, admired, resented, and missed. As for events, while none of them are factual, almost all of them are true. The resemblance this novel bears to actuality is never coincidental.

I’m sure I don’t need to expound here on the difference between fact and truth, but writing The Light of Seven Days, I found myself reflecting on the concept again and again. I found myself looking for the permeable boundary, for the balance between the two. This fraught liaison is essentially the root and goal of literature, isn’t it? Fiction takes facts and changes them, molds them, recoats and reshapes them, cuts them to pieces and splices them together in a verbal autopsy of a human life, all so it can expose their deeper truth. Their essence. The part of a fact that matters beyond the author. The universal seed of the particular. By this logic, all literature is myth: “What happened” becomes “what happens,” and that perpetual happening causes us to feel empathy, to relate to characters who are as different from us as we can imagine, to discover ourselves in foreign settings and dramas we haven’t lived. It is our guide to the human condition.

In one sense, The Light of Seven Days is a work of historical fiction: It is partly set in the context of a collapsed civilization, a realm that no longer exists. I ended up doing quite a bit of research, after all—filling the gaps in my memory, in my understanding of the intricacies of classical ballet, and in my knowledge of several aspects of the late Soviet Union. At the same time, the book is partly autobiographical: My protagonist and I both grew up Jewish in Leningrad; lived through Chernobyl, the Afghan war, and perestroika; escaped to America from the rise of Russian neo-Nazism; and made a home here. Having both entered intensive professional training as children—she as a dancer, I as a concert pianist—we endured many of the same struggles and epiphanies. Still, in the end, what matters here is neither history nor my own story. Those are just facts. The truths I tried to mine from those facts have to do not with what happened but with what happens: How we survive in a world where love walks hand in hand with murder. How we are connected across centuries, oceans, races, and ideas. What it means to have an identity and why we crave it. What it means to have faith. What lengths we go to so as not to be alone in the world.

In Hebrew, the term for a book’s release is yetziah la’or, literally its “exit to the light.” Over the nearly four years since my first scribbled notes, As Figs in Autumn has been for me many different things, and I expect that after exiting to the light it will continue to be more. As I look back on the project, I am told that Delphinium’s readers enjoy receiving insights on the author’s process; it will be my privilege to share some window into mine.

Here I could only begin with what began the process, what required it. Any memoir, I believe, carries an aspect of restoration for its author. As distinguished from an autobiography taking on a life’s entire arc, a memoir declares a more targeted mission, addressing itself to the unfinished business of a particular time. To write on that time is a matter of self-reclamation: never, of course, by changing the past, but by reclaiming one’s voice and presence—indeed, humanity—where one was made to feel without them before. In that act alone of revisiting, renewing feeling and meaning on one’s own terms, reasserting what he earlier lacked, he restores wholeness where there was fracture before. “Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage,” goes a lyric I’ve always loved, and yet I find it is not the perfect truth, for in that singing itself, there is a most un-ratlike freedom which was not yet won before he found the words.

In this view, it cannot surprise that so many memoirs focus on their authors’ times of helplessness: times of, above all, lack of agency in their own lives. Memoirs of addiction, or of grave illness, or of actual imprisonment all represent frequent themes. In the case of a soldier, who is stripped—not just by force of circumstance but by force of law—of the standing to feel and think and act of his own accord, it is a true act of restoration (and audacity) to recount these same events, yet now with a subversively human eye. This is a function served even by a soldier’s private writing, whether or not he goes on to place his words in public view. Likewise, this being the first mission of my writing, it was for me at first, then for a small circle of friends, well before its evolution to this yetziah la’or.

As Figs in Autumn is a book on identity, and on loss, and on family, and on home, though perhaps first it is a book on seeing each one of these through the soldier’s reordered world. Soldierhood, as I have written, was a place of yearning—and once ready, I found myself pouring page after page in order to record that yearning, and to make sense of what was yearned for.

Readers of the book may recall my wonder at the Hebrew language’s twinning of the words for “whole” (shalem) and “peace” (shalom), its implication that a state of wholeness and a state of peace are an identical essence, for the individual no less than for the wider world. Such a conviction—that is, retelling as a method of becoming more whole—was what carried this project from birth to its exit to the light, and I am thrilled to be retelling every word.

*Smashing Pumpkins. Lyrics to “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.” Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. 1995.

Read More about As Figs in Autumn: https://www.delphiniumbooks.com/book/as-figs-in-autumn/

When I set out to write Before She Sleeps, I wanted to portray a futuristic society in which Middle Eastern and South Asian women were trapped by their government: given false hope that their status had been elevated to that of mothers of the nation, when in fact they were its repopulation slaves after a nuclear war.

Although the women of the Panah enacted a type of rebellion, they were limited in their circumstances of a closed system, impossible to truly escape without the help and solidarity of men who would not participate in the authoritarian system on moral grounds, or for their own interests.

In The Monsoon War, I imagined a group of women living in the mountains, their lives still harsh and constrained by circumstances beyond their control. But they choose open revolution instead of closeted subversion. Thus, the two novels would play off against each other like night and day.

The women of the Hamiyat, the armed resistance group, unlike the women of the Panah, are soldiers who live openly, in the fresh air of the mountains instead of the underground bunker of the Panah and climate-controlled towers of the affluent city-dwellers. They fight and have fun and dream of glory in battle.

Similarly, I wanted to create main characters who were strong and active, rather than controlled and passive as they were in the previous novel. So, I came up with four women who would represent the archetypes of the novel: Alia, a Wife; Katy Azadeh, a Hamiyat soldier; Raana Abdallah, a Minister in the government, and Fatima Kara, a Commander in the Hamiyat.

These women are not just characters in their own right, but representations of the different stages of a woman’s life, from youth to adulthood and into mature middle age. They each have a defining role and unique characteristics so they stand out from the crowd. We see women negotiating with and handling power in all its iterations. The women of the Panah also make an appearance in the Monsoon War, at first like a Greek chorus, and then they slowly discover their own agency.

What’s interesting is that in The Monsoon War, there are male characters, but they operate on the periphery of the action involving the women. So, you have a General as a foil to the Minister, a science expert who is subservient to the commands of his superiors, and a man who was very important in Before She Sleeps but now only appears as a ghost in this book. It was an interesting experiment to see what would happen if men were cast in passive roles and women in action/active roles.

My inspiration for the premise of The Monsoon War came from some of the resistance movements by women that I was seeing taking place between 2014 and 2022. For example, the Kurdish women fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. I researched similar resistance movements in Colombia with the women of the FARC, and the participation of women in the Arab Spring revolutions.

I didn’t want to present an idealized version of women fighters, as they face tremendous obstacles and threats to their safety, and sexual harassment even when fighting alongside male compatriots. But I wanted to create a feeling of freedom and expansion for a group of women who are following their deepest passion and purpose.

Although The Monsoon War encompasses war, repression and death, there is also space for hope, change and joy, and that’s what I wanted to come across more strongly than anything else. Of course, who wins the war is important, but the act of fighting for what you believe in is the victory that transcends the outcome.

The Monsoon War (May 16, 2023) is available for pre-buy everywhere you purchase books. To find purchasing options -including IndieBound- and to read more about The Monsoon War and author Bina Shah, see our book pages.

From a writer’s perspective, the line between fiction and nonfiction, between memory and invention, between facts and the blurring of facts, is continuously diminished or dissolved, and most of the time I don’t think it matters. I love the documentary that has heightened the frisson to bring me closer to the screen, has recreated what “might” have happened even though no investigation has established that, because my brain, like most people’s, needs the caulk between the bricks, and will fill in the spaces regardless of what is there. Of course, I will be angry, say, if my bank similarly pads my account with pieces of paper that are not actual currency, or if a restaurant serves me a plate full of plastic food instead of the edible ingredients promised by the menu. Rationally, I understand that there must be a line between what-is and what-is-not. And I usually know where it is.

However, when things come partially from my own memory, I have stood in front of my mother and made her repeat a childhood incident over and over, and I have told her how I remember it differently. At first. If we call in my brother or my younger sister, they, too, will first latch on to versions that sound as if we were not only born in separate families but other countries. But eventually, each one will own up to the similarities, the shared threads, and we reach points in common.

It’s really a problem of polish. I admire anyone who can take the facts and give them a little Ken Burns spit ‘n shine, but my facts always needed garnish, too. I am a baker who likes frosting, and while we’re at it, let’s add sprinkles, and if there are going to be sprinkles, why not in many colors?

Aware of what I considered that failing, I started Little Miseries as a piece of literary journalism. I wanted it to be just the facts. I thought that to frost those memories, to finish out this metaphor, would be to trivialize them. I had only to tell the truth about my childhood in a way that would not harm the living or smear the dead, and still be compelling.

And that was the first draft. As it met its readers, the first being my agent, Mary Krienke, I saw the book’s flaw. There must be a hero, and it did not have one. In fact, the real Kim in my childhood was looking everywhere for the hero, and that was the point. The gnawing realization that we children were alone in the universe despite fawning adults, or because of them, was one none of us wanted to face.

In subsequent drafts, I became less of an observer, quaking behind almost closed doors, reporting on awful things, full of curiosity, and had to find someone in the book to act. My editor, my agent, the publisher, the assistants—people who loved the book and loved me—they were aching for the hero and the heroic act. The moment of salvation. The calvary. The saving of everyone. They needed it. They needed me.

So I had to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction once and for all and recall and then write out—and possibly exaggerate—all the tiny little rebellions of my childhood, the sitting in the car for hours at cemeteries, refusing to honor a grandfather I despised, and getting spanked for running away from hugs that made me nauseous. I had to embellish the moment I tripped my grandfather, who was already drunk, and might have tripped even if I hadn’t helped out, and the day when I hid his keys to the cash register at his hardware store so he couldn’t open the shop. It meant my grandmother could keep having coffee with my mother and laugh for another half-hour in our kitchen. I had pull out as if it was a daydream, but it was real, the day I whispered “Fuck you” under my breath in church, praying no one and everyone would hear. Notice the lack of Calvary’s trumpet? I know. I know.

In this year before publication, of the truths and half-truths stitched together from memory and wishful thinking, I had hoped my family and I would find a way back to one other, but we are actually more estranged than ever. They think I’ve said too much, and I think I haven’t said enough. From a writer’s perspective, the line between fiction and nonfiction is only as thick as the facts that support it. I owe my sister, my family, more than paper and ink. But the fog has not lifted for them, and I’m afraid to be swallowed up by their pain, and so, instead, with the only perspective I have, I write.