Hi Patmeena! Congratulations on the publication of Good People, one of our March subscription selections. What an incredible debut novel! How long did Good People take from your initial idea to your final draft?
Thank you so much! I began thinking about the idea for the book a few years before I started writing it. I didn’t know how to approach the subject at the time, or what the framework for such a story might look like. Once I did begin writing it took me ten years to complete the manuscript.
Good People is told through the lens of different people around the Sharaf family, rather than the family themselves. We hear from family friends, cousins, neighbours, and others who build a picture of the family and the events leading up to the tragic accident. What made you decide to tell the story in this format?
I chose to tell the story in this format because I was interested in exploring narrative authority and the preconceptions and biases and prejudices that we all have, which shape and colour the way we view the world and each other. I also wanted to explore how multifaceted and complex the “objective truth” of any one situation can be.
The story of the Sharaf family is told by many different people, and so through as many different perspectives, and the onus is on the reader, as they’re sifting through the pieces of the story, to decide which of the conflicting narrators is telling the truth, and why they’re more credible than the others. So that the story is being refracted through the eyes of many different narrators, but also through the individual ethos of the reader.
The book explores immigration, identity, conformity, hostility, and moral judgement. Where did the original idea for the story come from, and did your own experiences or stories from the media help shape how those themes were explored?
The idea for the book arose after I read a news story about an honour crime in Canada. In college I had written a thesis about the efforts of the Jordanian government to address honour-based violence within Jordan. So I had a bit of an academic background on the issue, though the research for my thesis had been focused on honour crimes in the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia. After reading about the case in Canada, I began researching cases of honour crimes in Canada and the US and across Europe. I was struck by the Islamophobic and xenophobic nature of the discourse surrounding these crimes, and by the lack of voices from the communities where the crimes had occurred in the telling of these stories.
Good People is not an autobiographical novel in terms of the events that occur within the book, but I did draw from my own background as the child of Afghan refugees who later immigrated to America and from the larger Afghan experience of displacement and exile in exploring the themes of the novel. I also drew from my own experiences of growing up within a community where family honour is very important and where the burden of maintaining the family’s good name and status as “good people” falls upon women.
Zorah is under intense pressure from her family and cultural expectations, caught between her family’s values and trying to live a normal teenage life in the U.S. As her story is told from afar rather than in her voice, how did you approach writing her character? Were you ever tempted to give us her own perspective?
Zorah’s parents, Rahmat and Maryam Sharaf, come to America as refugees who are eager to assimilate and to achieve the American Dream, but who are determined to do so without sacrificing their Afghan identity and their cultural and religious values. Zorah however yearns for the freedom to forge her own identity and create a future for herself without these cultural and religious constrains.
In writing her character, I tried to be as true as possible to not just her situation of being an Afghan American teenager caught between these two worlds, but to also be true to the difficulties of being a teenager no matter what your background or heritage is. I tried to write as honestly as possible about those years when you’re trying to fit in and trying to figure out who you are and testing boundaries and fighting for independence from parents who often seem like adversaries.
In the very early stages of writing the book I did experiment with parts of the book taking a more conventional, linear narrative form where the perspectives of Zorah and the rest of her family would be included, but I abandoned that approach very quickly in favour of telling the story primarily through the community around them.
As the book is told through many different voices, the mystery surrounding Zorah’s tragic accident, and whether something more sinister took place, is slowly built up through different points of view. How did you decide when to reveal what happened, and how to weave in the other accusations and suspicions surrounding the family?
I began writing the story without any kind of outline or idea for when certain information was going to be revealed. I had as my beginning two narrative threads, which became the first section of the book, and these were the Sharaf family setting off on a road trip one summer morning, and the Sharaf family arriving as refugees to the United States. From those two beginnings I pursued the story line by line and page by page, and the revelation of what happened and the accusations against the family that followed arose organically and on an instinctive level from that process.
When writing Good People, how did you balance writing compassion for the Sharafs while they were being judged and scrutinised by others?
There wasn’t any conscious intention on my part to write the Sharafs in a particularly compassionate way. However, my effort during the writing of the book was to write every single character, whether they were members of the Sharaf family or a narrator that appeared only once, as humanly as possible.
What was the most challenging part of writing the novel?
The most challenging part of writing the novel was showing up consistently and with discipline on the many days when I felt my vision for the book was beyond my abilities of execution or when I was stuck or uninspired.
What do you hope readers take away from Good People?
Good People is about the Afghan experience of exile and displacement and about what it means to be Muslim in the West. But it’s also about truth and identity and loss, and about the relationships between parents and children and the crushing weight of family expectations. My hope is that it may spark discussion among readers about these very difficult issues.
As both a reader and writer, which female authors have had the biggest influence on you?
The female authors who have expanded and shaped my consciousness of what fiction and writing can be, and whose works I return to again and again are: Jean Rhys, Toni Cade Bambara, Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Orne Jewett, Arundhati Roy, Flannery O’ Connor, Sandra Cisneros, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Katherine Mansfield, Lydia Davis, Barbara Tuchman and Carson McCullers.
If someone is just getting back into reading again, what is one book you would always recommend?
I would recommend Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut for anyone just getting back into reading.
What’s one book you can’t wait to get to this year?
This year I am very much looking forward to reading Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler.