Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Place for Us
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1991
WEBSITE: http://fatimafarheenmirza.com/
CITY:
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1991.
EDUCATION:Studied pre-med and creative writing; Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1991, Indian American Fatima Farheen Mirza was raised in California. As an undergraduate, she studied pre-med and creative writing. She also graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. In 2018, Mirza wrote the first book published under actress, producer, and designer Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth. Her novel, A Place for Us, follows an Indian-American Muslim family in California that must heal the fractures within. Rafig and Layla are traditional parents who know they must make exceptions for their American raised children. Oldest daughter Hadia is getting married in a love match, not the traditional arranged marriage. Middle daughter Huda wants a love match as well. Estranged youngest son Amar, who left the family years ago, returns for Hadia’s wedding. In flashbacks and shifting timelines, the reason for Amar’s leaving and other family secrets and troubles are revealed. Writing in BookPage, Jeff Vasishta proclaimed: “these multiple points of view and the seeming lack of plot make the story confusing,” however, overall, the book “resonates at the crossroads of culture, character, storytelling and poignancy.”
In an interview with Killian Fox online at the Guardian, Mirza explained why she wrote about Muslims in the West: “I was aware that this was an under-represented voice and I didn’t want to take advantage of it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters. Once I began writing about them, they became human to me … it was always a story about brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons—they just happened to be Muslim.”
Critics were generally not enamored of the time jumping of the plot. In Kirkus Reviews, a contributor maintained: “Unfortunately, as the story rolls back and forth through the chronology and the perspectives of the different family members, the conflicts are rehashed too many times and at too much length.” Online at New York Times Book Review, Lauren Christensen said: “Mirza’s chosen structure feels well suited to what may likely end up a film adaptation, but as a reader I found these leaps distracted from the otherwise convincing pathos of her characters’ emotional and moral plights.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer said the memoir was promising but flawed, noting the shuffling plot backward and forward without alerting the reader to a timeline, adding, however: “Mirza displays a particular talent for rendering her characters’ innermost emotional lives, signaling a writer to watch.” Ron Charles commented in Washington Post Online: “In prose of quiet beauty and measured restraint, Mirza traces those twined strands of yearning and sorrow that faith involves. She writes with a mercy that encompasses all things.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, June 2018, Jeff Vasishta, review of A Place for Us, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of A Place for Us.
Publishers Weekly, April 30, 2018, review of A Place for Us, p. 32.
ONLINE
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (June 1, 2018), Lauren Christensen, review of A Place for Us.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (June 11, 2018), Ron Charles, review of A Place for Us.
Fatima Farheen Mirza was born in 1991 and raised in California. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship.
Fatima Farheen Mirza: ‘I’d just stepped out of the subway when Sarah Jessica Parker called…’
By Killian Fox
The US-born novelist on being published by the Sex and the City actor, taking off the hijab and taking up boxing
Sun 3 Jun 2018 09.00 BST
Shares
115
Comments
6
Fatima Farheen Mirza: ‘I’m still discovering stuff people have always known.’ Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer
F
atima Farheen Mirza, 27, was born and raised in California. Her father grew up in Hyderabad, her mother in a British-Indian family in Birmingham. After starting pre-med classes, Mirza switched to creative writing and later gained a place at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose alumni include Ann Patchett and Curtis Sittenfeld. Her debut novel, A Place for Us, is the first book published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint for Hogarth – the Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist Paul Harding called it “a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty”. The novel explores tensions within a devout Muslim family in California around the turn of the 21st century.
How did the novel come about?
The first image came to me when I was 18. It was of a family gathered at the wedding of their eldest daughter and, as they’re about to take the family photograph, their son, Amar, cannot be found. The entire novel was written as a way for me to understand this moment. What were the dynamics in this family? What caused this fracturing [with Amar]? I began writing it in one of my creative writing classes and on my own at weekends.
How did you react when you heard that Sarah Jessica Parker was publishing the book?
I had just landed in NYC and stepped out of the subway the first time she called. The first thing I remember saying was: “Oh my God, I recognise your voice going back years.” I ducked into a McDonalds to escape the noise, and while we spoke, people kept asking to share the table with me. Such a surreal moment. I was stunned during our conversation, because she spoke so thoughtfully about the very scenes that meant the most to me in the book and I felt so comforted that she understood what those scenes meant to the characters, to me.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books our weekly email
Read more
We don’t see many novels exploring lives of Muslims in the west. Was that part of your motivation for writing it: to promote a better understanding of the Muslim community?
No, not at all. In fact, when I first realised that the family was Muslim, I hesitated, because I was aware that this was an under-represented voice and I didn’t want to take advantage of it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters. Once I began writing about them, they became human to me, they were not capital-letter Muslims, capital-letter post-9/11. To me it was always a story about brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons – they just happened to be Muslim.
When Hadia is about to get married, aged 27, you write that “She deeply respected hijab but did not wear it for herself”. Do you share her view?
I wore hijab from when I was nine until I was about 22. It wasn’t out of a lack of respect or care that I took it off. It was the opposite of that. It was because I have so much respect for hijab and for the women in my life who are devoted to it, that I realised my own personal relationship with it was not for the same reasons. It has made me who I am and it will always be a part of me, even if it is not visible to the outside world.
Advertisement
You decided to practise your faith in your own way?
Yes. I get quite emotional talking about it. I think that people reduce the hijab. One thing that really frustrated me when I first took it off, is that many people, including some of my friends, reacted by saying: “Now you’re liberated.” But to me that’s a simplification. For me, my mother is liberated when she chooses to wear it, and all the years that I wore it, that was my decision.
It struck me that the social limitations within the community in the novel are useful in storytelling terms. Even the most innocent-seeming romantic encounters become freighted with risk and suspense.
Yes, absolutely. As a fiction writer that was really exciting territory for me, because the details can be so small, and they hum in a way that is indicative of the secret inner life of these characters. From the outside perspective, a stick of gum being offered to somebody is just a stick of gum, yet to Hadia at 13, it’s so private and cherished. That’s where I feel fiction is offering the most – when it says to its reader, this is the private, secret life of this character and you have the privilege of accessing their thoughts.
Do I detect a West Side Story reference in the title [the song Somewhere has the line “There’s a place for us”]?
I’m unfamiliar with West Side Story, I know that sounds crazy to say.
Is that a reflection on your relationship with pop culture?
I grew up with a TV but I didn’t start listening to music until I was 13. We just weren’t allowed to listen to music growing up. Until I realised that my dad listening to Bollywood songs is still music, and I told him: “If you can listen to Bollywood music, I can listen to my music.” He thought about it for a moment and said “You’re right”, so I started listening to music. But I feel like, because of that, I’m discovering stuff that people have always known. I was maybe 22 when I heard the Rolling Stones for the first time. And my reaction was: “What. Is. This?”
What did your family make of your desire to become a writer?
When I first moved to pursue my undergraduate degree, I was in agreement with my dad that I would become a doctor. But I was miserable in my pre-med courses, so I switched to creative writing. Saying that I needed to write this novel was jarring for us at first, but, in the end, no one has been more supportive than my family. My brothers have been my readers, they have believed in the novel when I have doubted it. It was my brothers who were, like: “No, it works.”
My grandmother in England – she recently passed away – what she wanted was for me to settle down and get married to somebody from the community. Every time I’d call her with news of my book, her response was always: “Yes but when are you going to get married?” The last time I saw her before she died, she said: “Write your book with your whole heart, and finish it, and enjoy that… And then will you get married?” I was so moved because it was her first time acknowledging that this was what I wanted.
What do you get up to when you’re not working?
I’m learning how to box. As a kid my brothers played soccer, and every year we’d go buy them cleats for the new season, and I would see these pink boxing gloves and I would want them and I never got them. And so now, not only is boxing a really fun way to exercise, it also feels like I’m allowing a younger version of myself to have what she wanted then.
What’s next?
I guess I’ll always write, but I want to wait until I feel as compelled as I did with this story. [A Place For Us] is like a long love letter to the life that was mine right until I started writing it. It was a way to go back. Through the characters I could ask the questions that I had been asking myself my whole life.
What kind of questions?
What does it mean when asserting yourself as an individual can be seen as a betrayal to the home, or culture, or faith that you’ve come from? How do you navigate those instances? What do you owe to your loved ones? And what do you owe to yourself if there’s a conflict there?
So the questions faced by the characters in the novel are also questions you have had to confront?
Those moments arose in small or large ways throughout my life. It’s always been my goal with my family to try to be as respectful and thoughtful to them as I can, while not compromising my inner voice.
In a beautiful way, it’s through the novel that I can understand that dynamic between the individual and their greater community with so much more complexity than when I was in it. It’s helped me understand where I’ve come from and who I am and what is important to me.
• A Place for Us is published by SJP for Hogarth (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Fatima Farheen Mirza: Finding Her Place in the Literary World
photo: Gregg Richards
Fatima Farheen Mirza was born and raised in California. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. A Place for Us (June 12, 2018) is her debut novel and is the first literary work acquired by award-winning actress and producer Sarah Jessica Parker as editorial director of her newly launched imprint, SJP for Hogarth.
A Place for Us is set within a Muslim American family and their community, and explores many universal themes defining those important relationships: love and loss, familial and cultural expectations, honor and betrayal, faith and tradition. There's so much emotion within these pages. Did all of those elements evolve naturally for you as your writing progressed?
While writing, I never explicitly thought about the characters in relation to these themes, only asked myself--what do the characters want in this moment? How are their needs and hopes in conflict with one another? But I believe that the universal themes you mentioned--love and loss, familial and cultural expectations, honor and betrayal, etc.--are found in every life, in every story to different degrees, even if the particulars of the plot change.
The novel is divided into four parts, with perspectives and voices from several main characters in this family: Layla, the mother; Hadia, the oldest daughter; Amar, the son; and Rafiq, the father. As this story unfolds, we get to see each character's point of view of the same situation, often a small yet pivotal moment in time. Was that a difficult balance for you as an author? Did one character's voice or experience resonate more strongly for you?
Trying to understand what these shared moments meant to each character was one of the most challenging and exciting parts of writing--those were the scenes that stretched my imagination, motivated me to discover what I had not been paying attention to and often surprised me, as they revealed my own assumptions about the characters. I don't want to give any important plot points away, but at one point, after I wrote the same moment through three different perspectives, I realized that each character remembers, or pays attention to, what they feel most guilty about in the moment, rather than what was done to them.
Sometimes, when following Layla's or Rafiq's perspective, I was aware that I personally disagreed with their logic in the moment. Those were difficult moments to navigate but maybe the most important ones for me to sit with, as I had to articulate their experience as they would, and in doing so I had to imagine a thought process that was so unlike my own. But the novel depends on the way different points of view are in conflict with one another, and to understand that conflict I had to figure out each character's relationship to their inner voice, faith, community and even how they defined love. That was a heartbreaking moment: to realize that these characters did not even agree on what love is, what role love plays in their life. Once I understood their individuality, it was easier to explore how these pivotal moments affected each of them.
Writing Rafiq's voice was by far the most powerful experience. It is the only voice in first person and it arrived all at once, as if fully formed.
A Place for Us is the first novel published under SJP for Hogarth. How involved was Sarah Jessica Parker in this process and what was it like working with her? What does it mean for you to have your first novel be her inaugural title?
Working with Sarah Jessica and everyone at SJP for Hogarth has been such a moving and exciting experience. For years, I'd been so focused on the writing process that I had not pictured what it would be like to publish, but everything--from my conversations with Sarah Jessica about the book or working closely with my brilliant editors in revising it--has exceeded my highest hopes for the novel. Every time I've spoken with Sarah Jessica about the novel, I've had the thought that she is the ideal reader a writer might want for their book, as she is thoughtful and insightful, generous with her heart and precise in her observations, and her responses reflect how genuinely she feels for characters and how much time she spends thinking about them. All of this has made this experience a lot more meaningful and personal than I could have imagined, and I feel fortunate that it all aligned in a way that SJP for Hogarth will be publishing it.
Tell us about your writing process. You started this novel during your freshman year of college--was it challenging to balance academics and novel writing? How long did it take you to write A Place for Us?
Soon after I started writing the novel, I switched my studies from pre-med courses to creative writing, so most of my classes did not take away from my novel but began to feed it: they exposed me to literature, helped me learn how to read as a writer, and often allowed me to workshop early sections. So many of my memories in undergrad are from writing in cafés between classes and on weekends. I remember I'd stick a ton of Post-its on the table I was working on, and would rewrite the writing lessons I had learned onto the Post-its, so that I could glance up at them any time I looked away from the page. I was 18, almost 19, when I started the novel, and I often feel as though I have grown into who I am with the novel, or that I've been working on it for as long as I've known who I am.
What can readers expect next from you, writing-wise? Are you working on anything new?
It was out of love for this family that I pushed myself to do right by their story, and I poured my entire energy into capturing their lives. I am always writing, but a part of me doesn’t want to allow myself to commit to writing another novel until I feel the same care for the characters that I did for Amar and Hadia and Layla and Rafiq, and that urgency to understand their lives. --Melissa Firman
Fatima Farheen Mirza is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She has taught creative writing and fiction courses at the University of Iowa and at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Awarded the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship in 2016 and The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research/Creative Achievement from The University of California, Riverside, she has also received residencies from The Marble House Project and The MacDowell Colony. Her debut novel will be published by SJP for Hogarth in 2019.
FATIMA FARHEEN MIRZA was born in 1991 and raised in California. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship.
Sarah Jessica Parker and Fatima Farheen Mirza on the Debut Novel 'A Place For Us'
It's the inaugural novel for Sarah Jessica Parker’s imprint with Hogarth books.
By Brianna Kovan
Jun 6, 2018
Hogarth + Gregg Richards
Author Fatima Farheen Mirza’s magical debut novel, A Place for Us, hits bookstores nationwide on June 12. She tells the story of a Muslim Indian-American family of five, who collectively and individually struggle with the expectations of their heritage, along with death, dating, and opioid addiction. At its core, it’s a beautiful story of relationships, both between siblings, and between parents and children. Need more convincing? A Place for Us is the inaugural novel for Sarah Jessica Parker’s imprint with Hogarth books, through which the actress will publish a handful of books each year. The debut author, 27, sits down the SJP to discuss.
How would you summarize the story for our readers?
Sarah Jessica Parker: This is a book about a quintessentially American family. It’s a search for home, both metaphorically and literally. This is a story of people coming from far away and placing their hopes in an idea.
Fatima Farheen Mirza: Layla and Rafiq are immigrants from India, but their children are born [in America.] There’s no history for them but the one that they’re making together.
Available June 12th
Shop Now
What’s the title mean to you?
FFM: When Amar is five, the children ask if they can go on a picnic. Hadia wants tangerines; Huma, lemonade; and Amar, a river. They all want such different things. Rafiq’s response is, “Let’s try. I might know a place for us.” That’s the one time where the title comes up in the text. It’s impossible for the wants and desires of these characters to coexist. But the title gestures: Maybe there’s a place, future, or way that we can come together.
SJP: One of the happiest scenes in when Rafiq shows them their first home. There’s so much joy and giddiness, which isn’t touched by worry. The title’s a destination point for everybody. Sometimes I think it’s as much for the reader as it is for the characters.
Why is this story important to you?
SJP: I was immediately drawn to this manuscript because it’s a book for our time, about our country now. This is the internal monologue that exists. It’s about experiences I will likely never have, but I am better for knowing them. Amar’s beat up at school when they tell him that his father looks like a terrorist. I can’t imagine internalizing that.
FFM: I want readers to feel like they’ve been allowed access to this family’s life for a decade, into very intimate moments between these characters.
"It’s about experiences I will likely never have, but I am better for knowing them."
Which character do you sympathize with the most?
FFM: I had the most care and love for [the son] Amar, and the desire to understand him. Each of the characters revolves around him, trying to make sense of why he left. I go back to the scenes of their childhood, and he was touched by this darkness. They’re already worrying for him.
Which sections are the most powerful to you?
FFM: Any scene where the characters betray one another, or cut down their loved ones. Those moments were hardest for me. I knew how, in some ways, they’d never recover from those moments. I’d have to take a walk or call my mom, and say, “Mummy, I’m so heartbroken that the character acted in this way.” And she’s like, “Well, can you change it.” I’m like, “No, it has to happen.”
SJP: I asked Fatima the other day, “Do you think Amar is okay?” I think about him in the same way I think about Theo Decker in The Goldfinch. He stayed with me. It is such a big story, but it’s also about intimacy and the littlest things.
Kimberly Butler
Where did these characters originate?
FFM: I share so much in common with these characters—both a similar culture, faith, and community—but the plot belongs to this family alone. I didn’t want to imagine my life in fiction form. I have three younger brothers. One said, “Fatima, it wasn’t until I read this that I realized how powerful it is seeing a life like mine reflected in fiction.”
This article originally appeared in the June 2018 issue of ELLE.
A PLACE FOR US
Jeff Vasishta
BookPage. (June 2018): p21.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
A PLACE FOR US
By Fatima Farheen Mirza
SJP for Hogarth $27, 400 pages ISBN 9781524763558 Audio, eBook available
A Place for Us has been guaranteed a certain amount of prerelease publicity as the first novel under actress, producer and designer Sarah Jessica Parker's new imprint, SJP for Hogarth. The author, Fatima Farheen Mirza, is a 26-year-old graduate of the highly respected Iowa Writers' Workshop. The novel concerns itself with the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family living in California. The opening scene is the wedding of eldest daughter Hadia. The bride's prodigal brother, Amar, has returned after an absence of several years, and the reasons for this absence unfold in ensuing chapters.
Hadia and Amar, along with sister Huda, are the children of Layla and Rafiq, and the interior lives of these characters are explored in continually shifting timelines. Early on, these multiple points of view and the seeming lack of plot make the story confusing, but A Place for Us gains traction when Amar is bullied at school around 9/11. He is also involved in a forbidden romance with Amira Ali, the daughter of a well-respected local family whose eldest son died in a car accident.
Overshadowing all these events are the parameters of a deeply traditional Muslim culture--arranged marriages, the differing set of standards and expectations for men and women, the pressure for academic achievement--and the looming sense of being an "other" in American society.
Immigrant novels often center on conflict and the juxtaposition between Old World values and modern Western culture. In seeking a better life for their children, Layla and Rafiq must contend with this and the effect it has on their family. A Place for Us resonates at the crossroads of culture, character, storytelling and poignancy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vasishta, Jeff. "A PLACE FOR US." BookPage, June 2018, p. 21. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540052008/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6b1cdb6e. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540052008
A Place for Us
Publishers Weekly. 265.18 (Apr. 30, 2018): p32+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Place for Us
Fatima Farheen Mirza. SJR $27 (448p)
ISBN 978-1-5247-6355-8
Bonds of faith and family strengthen and strangle in this promising but flawed debut, set in a close-knit Indian Muslim community in California. The story opens with the wedding of Hadia, golden child of Layla and Rafiq and older sister to Huda and Amar, skillfully setting up the central tension: why has Amar, the troubled youngest, been absent from the family, and can he be drawn back? The plot then shuffles backward and forward, revisiting plot points with few signposts to let the reader know when exactly key events--an untimely death, the snuffing out of a forbidden relationship, a family-rupturing fight--take place. Perspective alights on various characters, revealing more about some than others; middle child Huda remains nearly opaque, and early references to Rafiq's violent temper are all but dropped. For the final 80 pages, Rafiq narrates, and the story at last coheres. He delivers a heartrending reflection on his role in his son's partly self-imposed banishment: "It is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound." Mirza displays a particular talent for rendering her characters' innermost emotional lives, signaling a writer to watch. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Place for Us." Publishers Weekly, 30 Apr. 2018, p. 32+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537852219/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=943cf017. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537852219
Mirza, Fatima Farheen: A PLACE FOR US
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Mirza, Fatima Farheen A PLACE FOR US SJP for Hogarth (Adult Fiction) $27.00 6, 12 ISBN: 978-1-5247-6355-8
An American Muslim family is torn apart in the struggle between tradition and modernity.
"The wedding was coming together wonderfully. People were arriving on time. There was a table for mango juice and pineapple juice and another for appetizers, replenished as soon as the items were lifted from the platter. White orchids spilled from tall glass vases on every table." But down the hall at the hotel bar, there is an element of this wedding that is not coming together so smoothly--the prodigal brother of the bride. Amar ran away from home years earlier after a series of escalating troubles in high school, rooted in a forbidden romance between him and Amira Ali, the daughter of a prominent local family. Their connection became only more intense when Amira's older brother, a close friend of Amar's, was killed in a car accident. The novel moves back and forth in time to explore the story of parents Layla and Rafiq and their three children, Hadia, Huda, and Amar. The events of 9/11, the temptations of drugs and alcohol, the pressure for academic achievement, and the traditions of arranged marriage all play a role. It is Hadia, the bride, who has reached out to her brother and begged him to attend her wedding, but when he sees his one-time love Amira among the guests, old secrets and betrayals bubble to the surface. Unfortunately, as the story rolls back and forth through the chronology and the perspectives of the different family members, the conflicts are rehashed too many times and at too much length. The debut of 26-year-old Mirza is the first book from Sarah Jessica Parker's imprint at Hogarth; it explores the spiritual lives of its characters with sympathy and passion. The title of the book echoes a song from West Side Story, itself a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. Here the warring forces are not two families but one, split by the tension between reverence and rebellion.
The author's passion for her subject shines like the moon in the night sky, a recurrent image in this ardent and powerful novel.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mirza, Fatima Farheen: A PLACE FOR US." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700552/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cc43d620. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700552
Sarah Jessica Parker Has a Book She Wants You to Read
Image
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Credit
Gregg Richards
Buy Book ▾
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
By Lauren Christensen
June 1, 2018
A PLACE FOR US
By Fatima Farheen Mirza
383 pp. SJP for Hogarth. $27.
There are two kinds of belonging in Fatima Farheen Mirza’s debut novel, “A Place for Us,” the first title published under Sarah Jessica Parker’s brand-new imprint at Hogarth, and they are often mutually exclusive. There is the more conspicuous story about Rafiq and Layla — a Muslim-Indian immigrant couple in California — and their children Hadia, Huda and Amar, who seek over decades to reconcile their non-Western values and customs with those of 21st-century suburban America. But woven throughout this arc is a micro-narrative of a young man coming of age within that family and struggling to find his own “place” within it. Mirza’s attempt to nestle the more intimate tale within the broader societal one is ambitious. The result is a family epic that is textured and keenly felt, if at times meandering.
The opening scene takes place at Hadia’s wedding, where she eagerly anticipates a reunion with her estranged brother, Amar. From there the narrative catapults among time periods — from the parents’ courtship in India, to various stages of the children’s upbringing, to later in their adulthood when Hadia is a physician on the team that is treating her father’s brain tumor — and perspectives, alternating the viewpoints of Hadia, Amar and Layla, sometimes within a single chapter. (Rafiq’s testimony in the final section feels both tacked on and overly sentimental, and the reader is left wondering why poor Huda, the middle child, is the only one elided from the text altogether.) Mirza’s chosen structure feels well suited to what may likely end up a film adaptation, but as a reader I found these leaps distracted from the otherwise convincing pathos of her characters’ emotional and moral plights.
Image
Indeed these plights and the themes they belie are often just as varied and frenetically sketched as the novel’s architecture. If Amar’s alienation can be identified as the book’s central tension (and given all the competing tensions, I am not 100 percent sure that it can), then the reasons behind it, the context that made it so, are muddied by the way Mirza eschews traditional plot development. Instead we are ushered from one wildly disparate world to the next, from nostalgic reminiscences — the novel takes its title from a bittersweet reverie of a riverside picnic that was the request of a young Amar, to which Rafiq replies, “We can try … I might know a place for us” — to the nature and nuances of heritage, inheritance and familial bonds as well as the harsh realities of post-Sept. 11 xenophobia.
Sections
The Washington Post
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Books Review
Sarah Jessica Parker thinks she knows what you should read. She’s right.
By Ron Charles
June 11
Celebrity imprints rank among the publishing industry’s most desperate schemes. If you liked “Edward Scissorhands” — the thinking goes — you’ll want to read books Johnny Depp has chosen to reflect his true passions. HarperCollins, Random House and Grand Central have all signed up stars to direct new imprints, hoping fans of, say, Gwyneth Paltrow or Lena Dunham will follow them into the bookstore to buy their branded titles.
(SJP for Hogarth)
At the very least, it’s a way to get books plugged on celebrities’ Twitter accounts, though I’ve seen little evidence that people choose what to read by the imprint. The whole enterprise has about as much credibility as game show hosts hawking Medigap insurance.
Which brings us to Sarah Jessica Parker, the Emmy Award-winning star of “Sex and the City.” Since that iconic TV show went off the air in 2004, Parker has made millions selling jeans, shoes, perfume and hair coloring, but now she’s going after the big bucks: book editing. “SJP for Hogarth” is the name of her new imprint in the Penguin Random House empire, and this week Parker is releasing her first book.
[Sex and the City and Us]
We have every reason to be skeptical. But SJP is not launching with a celebrity cookbook, a millionaire memoir or anything remotely flashy. Instead, the first book from Parker’s imprint is a work of literary fiction: a quiet novel by an unknown 26-year-old writer named Fatima Farheen Mirza.
And it is absolutely gorgeous.
Honestly, I haven’t felt this awed since I picked up a novel called “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” by a then-unknown young writer named Anthony Marra. Mirza writes about family life with the wisdom, insight and patience you would expect from a mature novelist adding a final masterpiece to her canon, but this is, fortunately, just the start of an extraordinary career.
“A Place for Us” opens at a wedding in Northern California. A doctor named Hadia is getting married, and her greatest joy is that her errant brother, Amar, has returned after three years of silence. The entire family feels suspended between delight and apprehension: Will Amar stay this time? Will their father control his anger at the boy — now a man? Old grievances are exhumed. Long-simmering fears flash into fresh flame. Hope too intense to contain excites each member of the family. But these roiling emotions must be managed as the wedding ceremony progresses, as food is served, as guests gossip and offer compliments. Nothing must overshadow Hadia’s special day, not even the return of a prodigal son, for which they have all prayed ceaselessly.
Mirza will revisit that wedding ceremony again and again over the next several hundred pages, but she has no concern with chronology. She wanders through the attic of this family’s memories, lighting upon old and new incidents, little betrayals and secrets scattered across their collective consciousness. We see the parents, Layla and Rafiq, decades ago, before their arranged marriage back in India. We follow Hadia to medical school. We spy a teenage Amar falling in love for the first time, with such intense delight you can’t help but recall those disruptive days and nights in your own life.
Author Fatima Farheen Mirza (Gregg Richards)
And what’s more, as we experience all these events from different points of view, they’re gradually polished into new meaning. Little Amar’s spelling test, for instance, is just one of an infinite series of moments in the child’s life — until his father and his sisters consider it later as a point of inflection. Did the boy cheat? Did he really deserve a reward for scoring well? “How were they to know the moments that would define them?” Hadia wonders. Whether that spelling test actually redirected Amar’s life can never be established, of course, but this is a novel about how families create their own history and mythology — and how those assumptions about the past haunt their relations with each other.
Has a household ever been cradled in such tender attention as this novel provides? Possibly, but in a different register. As Marilynne Robinson has done with Protestants and Alice McDermott has done with Catholics, Mirza finds in the intensity of a faithful Muslim family a universal language of love and anguish that speaks to us all.
[Anthony Marra’s ‘A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,’]
When Rafiq and his young bride came to the United States, they barely knew each other, but they were united in their determination to raise a faithful family. And so, in many ways, “A Place for Us” is an immigrant tale in that long line of American novels about devout parents struggling to maintain traditional mores amid a secular culture designed to tempt their children astray. But Mirza complicates that common story with a kind of palpable devotion that makes rejection of the parents’ faith unthinkable. “What a strange and archaic world,” Hadia thinks — not with derision, simply astonishment. Yes, she and her sister feel cramped by their parents’ inflexible rules; they have no intention of agreeing to arranged marriages or lives of servitude. But they hear the word of the prophet, too; they feel the same currents of faith flowing through them. The only difference is they’re determined to chart a new Western way of living as Muslims.
The open wound in this family is the youngest child, that wayward son, Amar. He’s sweet and curious, intense and undisciplined. “A young man acting like a young man would not be a problem in any other family,” Hadia thinks. But in this family, the teen’s energy grates against the strictures of Islam, and that clash inspires evermore perilous cycles of rebellion and guilt.
Part of what makes Mirza’s novel captivating is her ability to shift among perspectives so gracefully. We feel the panic of Amar’s parents as they struggle to find some effective balance between discipline and indulgence. And we feel the torment of Amar’s conviction that he doesn’t belong, that he’s not right, that he doesn’t deserve the blessing of salvation and, finally, that he’s not a Muslim. Yet the real agony, which Mirza plumbs with such heartbreaking sympathy, is Amar’s incurable longing for the balm of belief and the embrace of his devout parents.
In prose of quiet beauty and measured restraint, Mirza traces those twined strands of yearning and sorrow that faith involves. She writes with a mercy that encompasses all things. If the demands of Islam make Rafiq behave cruelly toward his only son, those same demands eventually inspire a confession of affection that is among the most poignant things I have ever read. Each time I stole away into this novel, it felt like a privilege to dwell among these people, to fall back under the gentle light of Mirza’s words.
Ron Charles is the editor of Book World and host of TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.