General

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.