The Second Reason is Distinctiveness

Among the nine reasons to read my upcoming book, From the Lives We Knew, the second point to consider is the distinctiveness of individuals and situations. In the opening chapter of the fourth section, Kay Kirby recalls a tongue-in-cheek slogan, printed on a card under the plate glass covering of her father’s desk, which said, “My mind’s made up; don’t confuse me with the facts!”

Quite often, facts negate the made-up mind.

As fiction, my book sprang up from my imagination. I invented several situations and alleged facts which I knew did not exist. To be more precise, however, I shaped the characters and situations from my impressions of people and circumstances which do, in fact, exist. As a potter molds clay mixed with water, or as a baker mixes and kneads flour, water, and yeast into a loaf for baking in the oven, so a writer mixes and shapes non-fiction ingredients into fiction. My primary ingredients in writing From the Lives We Knew have been facts.

A credible disclaimer could be, “The points of view expressed by the characters in these tales do not necessarily represent the opinions of their producer.” I didn’t deliberately grind any axes or ride any hobby horses, but neither did I conceal my biases. Of the five separate narrators who present the 40 stories in this book, each one has as distinctive way of remembering events, interpreting meanings, and making sense of outcomes.

In the early stages of writing these stories, I was struck by enduring motifs, such as forced dispossession, found in literature since biblical and classical times. On a surface level, someone may easily recognize such themes in my book. However, I want to caution the reader about making generalizations. I did not shape my characters to fit any classical pattern, much less a stereotype of the refugee.

Instead, what I have found compelling, and what I hope the reader will find engaging, is the distinctiveness, the particularity, of the personalities, crises, and outcomes in these stories. Had I relied more heavily on imagination and less on facts, the characters might be even more unpredictable, and thus, for some readers, even more entertaining. However, I opted not to manipulate the material as entertainment. Even though these characters are fictitious, to me, they have become real individuals, to whom I have felt a moral obligation to present them faithfully to the best of my ability.

The second reason for reading From the Lives We Knew, then, is to get beyond preconceptions and generalizations about Palestinians, Kosovars, Iraqis, and even Americans, and to enjoy the distinctiveness of the individual lives encountered in these stories.