The Other Americans

by Laila Lalami

What a fragile thing a heart was. So easy to fool. To break. To stop on impact in a darkened intersection.

I love this book.

Soon, newspapers would run their annual celebrations of American soldiers, and politicians would take turns pandering to them. Meanwhile, the civilians who died in American wars would receive only silence. National memory was built from such erasures.

Home, above all, was the family who loved me. Only now, after my father’s death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.