General

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.