The Author’s Notebook

Dr. Barzani began as a character in the novel. As I wrote, he became my companion. I began turning to him with my questions, listening for how he might answer. He was a poet, a gentleman. In him, I saw the kind of man I wanted to be.

I thought I was bringing him into the novel. I did not yet know that I was entering it with him.

At the end of each chapter, Dr. Barzani and I looked back at what had happened. From that conversation, I wrote an original quatrain. I wrote those verses with the poetry of Rumi and Antarah ibn Shaddad in mind. The quatrain became a signature of my books.

He was always there for me.

Yet the Nora I had carried for years was already somewhere else: outside with the children at dusk, shaping a story with her hands while the light thinned over Baghdad. I had kept that image away from the opening because it seemed too quiet. I thought the novel needed confrontation first.

Reading the chapter again, I saw that Nora did not need an introduction. She needed to be present before anyone explained her. I moved her to the beginning, among the children. John sees her there without defining her for the reader.

Once I made that change, I could remove much of the backstory I had placed around her. The past now comes through a photograph, a remembered name, an object held a little too long. The reader receives fragments because Nora herself does not yet have the whole.

At Dr. Yanni Jahlil’s house, I made the same choice. I stopped explaining who held power in the room. It became visible in closed doors, unfinished conversations, and the way people watched one another.

I stopped trying to settle the ending. Nora and John part without knowing what has begun. That uncertainty belonged to them.

I wrote one line in the margin:

Maybe the story begins where she pauses, not where someone challenges her.

I kept it beside me while I revised.

In the earlier version, I explained that distance too often. Rereading the chapter, I found it more clearly in the smaller exchanges: the warmth of the foil in John’s hand, his father remembering their old order, expectation returning over coffee the next morning. Affection is present between them. So is the life his father has already imagined for him.

Earlier, I made Kristen carry too much of that distance. She began to seem like an obstacle between John and what he had left in Baghdad. That was unfair to her. She sees that part of him remains elsewhere and asks what place that leaves for her. Their argument is sharp, and John leaves angry. But the argument does not create the distance between them. It exposes what was already there.

John says that part of him stayed in Baghdad. By then, his return has already shown it. He works, runs, goes to church, and tries to accept the shape of the life waiting for him. None of it answers the questions he carried home.

Near the end, Nora returns at the edge of a photograph on his screen. She is almost obscured, still and watchful. John enlarges the image. His cider cools beside him.

I once thought the chapter needed a declared turning point. I kept the decision smaller. John stands and reaches for his coat.

The chapter could stop there.

The opening conversation once explained too much. I had let everyone speak as though they had revised their thoughts before saying them. Marriage, faith, and belonging arrived in complete arguments. When Nora stands and says, "I need time," the room becomes more honest. She cannot yet explain what is happening inside her.

I worried about the wedding for a different reason. The violet curtains, the oud, and the food could easily have become decoration. The Louis XVI coin gave those details something solid to gather around. It could be held and passed from one hand to another. Dounia carried its history in her palm.

The moment I questioned longest comes after Nora leaves the celebration and finds Ismail beneath a streetlamp with a joint between his fingers. She sits beside him, takes it from him, and draws on it herself.

I nearly removed that action because it seemed unlike her. But Nora is so often expected to understand, protect, or steady someone else. Here, she has no answer. She coughs. She remains beside a young man she does not know how to help. For once, she is not his guide.

The following morning, Ismail refuses the name Isaac. Earlier versions explained his struggle through faith, assimilation, and family history. His own words did more:

"I’m not Isaac. I’m Ismail."

He knows what he wants to be called. That does not mean he knows where he belongs.

I kept the thunder at the end, though I still question the sentence that follows it. The weather has already changed. I am not certain the reader needs to be told what that change means.

Let the city act. Don’t make it speak.

It was less a rule I had followed than one I needed.

I had filled Marrakech with color, music, food, heat, and scent. Whenever a passage seemed too still, I added another detail, then another sentence telling the reader what the city meant. I was afraid that if I stopped describing its wonder, Marrakech might become only scenery.

The more I explained, however, the less room the city had.

The passages I trusted most were quieter: Nora touching the tiles of the riad, mint tea warming her hands, steam gathering in the hammam, the cold night air against John’s skin when he steps outside. In those moments, Marrakech changes how they move and what stays with them.

Omar posed a similar problem. Whenever I asked him to interpret every custom or mystery, he began to sound less like a man and more like a guide. Sometimes pouring tea or bargaining with a vendor told me more about him than another explanation could. I had to learn the difference between hospitality and exposition.

John interested me most when he stopped interpreting everything around him. In the hammam, he lies still, listens, and allows the ritual to remain partly beyond his understanding. I did not need him to name what had changed.

Restraint did not mean emptying Marrakech. The city still had to feel abundant. I had to decide which details belonged and which were there because I was reluctant to stop. At some point, I had to trust the reader to remain in the scene without being told what it meant.

The sentence remained beside me throughout the revision:

Let the city act. Don’t make it speak.

I did not always obey it. That is probably why I kept returning to it.

His wife and children welcomed him.

I wondered whether the response would have been the same if the young man had come looking for his mother.

The question came before the plot. Aksel and Tasa developed from it, each knowing a different part of the family. I chose to tell most of the story through them. Izil and Lina came forward when their children could not know what had happened before they were born.

The DNA result brought them into the same crisis in Chapter 8. Tasa’s involvement with drugs had already begun; afterward, her situation worsened while Aksel left to find Liam. I stopped trying to make their stories move at the same pace.

I stayed closest to Aksel and Tasa, but there were moments when I needed to see the family through Izil, Lina, or Liam. Those passages changed my first understanding of them. Some chapters remained with one child longer than I had planned, and I left them there.

The ‘Curtain’ in the title came from the way the family hid behind appearances. Lina kept the truth about Aksel’s birth, and Izil worked to preserve the family he wanted others to see. Even Tasa’s distress could remain unnoticed in the same house.

A stage curtain suited Tasa’s theater. It also suited Aksel’s life before crowds and cameras. Visibility did not mean they were understood.

The title allowed light and concealment to remain together. The family learns the truth, but it does not immediately know what to do with it.

When Aksel found Liam and watched Shane play for Shamrock Rovers, soccer became present again. Liam’s career gave him a connection he had not known, and his desire to emulate his birth father drew him back toward the game.

Aksel had been away from soccer for years. I let the old movements return before his confidence did. While writing those chapters, I did not yet know whether memory would be enough to carry him forward.

I did not want Aksel’s choice to become an argument over which country deserved him. By the time reporters asked, each country was already part of his life. He had to consider his family and his future before answering.

I wanted the reader to remain with the pause before he spoke. His decision would be welcomed by some and questioned by others. That was the pressure I wanted to keep on the page.

That call gave the book its title.

He did not tell a story as though it had been written somewhere. He kept what had stayed with him: a beginning, a quarrel, a gesture, a sentence, sometimes only the turn that made people listen. From those pieces, he made the story again.

That way of telling stayed with me.

When I began Amachahou, my first pieces followed the shape of fables I had encountered in North African books or remembered hearing from my father. After a while, I realized that I was still retelling inherited material. I began working instead from fragments of memory, things I had witnessed, and traces left by my reading.

Some readers asked whether the triads were poems. When I read them aloud, I noticed that some pauses visible on the page disappeared in the telling. I revised the triads in fuller paragraphs to see whether the stories could keep their rhythm without relying so heavily on space.

I kept the earlier versions and continue to compare the two approaches.

The first begins with a disturbance: a door is left open, a bowl is pulled across a table, a name is withheld, or a child is sent away. Something has changed, even if those involved do not yet understand what it will cost.

The second part places that change under pressure. Someone refuses, asks, takes, gives, or remains silent. The first event begins to affect another person.

In the third part, an action, discovery, or consequence alters what came before. Sometimes the immediate problem ends. Sometimes the story stops with a chair moved, a name written down, or a door still open.

When I read the triads aloud, I could hear when a part had merely repeated what came before. I revised until each part changed the situation and made the next one necessary. I also learned that the final part did not need to explain the story. It could leave an image, an object, or a silence for the listener to carry beyond the telling.

I began the triad with that question. As I wrote, the girl began to speak of herself as though she were someone else.

I did not name what had happened inside her. I left that to the reader or listener.

At first, I did not think her story belonged in Amachahou. It came from life too directly, and I worried that writing it would turn her into an example of courage or suffering.

I kept thinking about her. Eventually, I stopped asking whether she belonged in the book and wrote the triad.