A Place for Us
by Fatima Farheen Mirza
introduced by Garth Greenwell
Ialways cringe a little when a novel is called “wise.” I have a hard time trusting writers who try to convey a sense of knowingness, of being secure in their own knowledge. And yet, as I finished reading Fatima Farheen Mirza’s extraordinary debut novel, A Place for Us, published in June as the first title from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint at Hogarth, I found myself feeling grateful to it for something I can only call wisdom. The novel, which follows an Indian Muslim family in America whose foundation is fractured by the warring pulls of modernity and tradition, is distinctive in its deep understanding of how families work, of how they’re run through with tiny fissures and bound together by a love that is inseparable from injury.
Mirza, who was born in California in 1991and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, possesses an authorial wisdom far beyond her years. It is a wisdom that lies not in knowingness so much as in a sense that people are always more mysterious than the explanations we give for their actions, that what is essential in the human will always escapes our understanding. It’s something more than wisdom to see human beings this way. It is a kind of grace. In the months before my book was published I felt happy, terrified, excited, terrified, happy. How are you?
For years it was my goal to tell the story of this family. Now that it is finally complete, I feel a great sense of satisfaction and gratitude and relief. But I’m also surprised by how much I feel the loss of them—the characters I’d lived with and tried to understand a bit better every day. Writing a novel is demanding, but it is also comforting: You know what it requires of you. So it is frightening now to be without a project as dear to me as this novel has been. But I am so excited to share it with the world.
One of the things that feels distinctive about the book is its deeply lived-in quality; it seems like a book you’ve been thinking about for a long time. How long did it take to reach its final form? I started the novel after I’d moved away for college, which was the first time I could reflect on my community and faith with some distance. Sometimes, when flipping through the book now, I think of the novel as a long love letter to the life that was mine right up until I began writing it. The book is told from four perspectives, each a member of the family. How hard was it to find the voice for each character?
The characters’ voices developed naturally, especially the father’s, which seemed to arrive all at once and fully formed. But what was very difficult was imagining the thought processes and motivations of the parents in certain scenes. They experience what I haven’t: They immigrated here from India; they have the responsibility of raising children and the desire to do so in accordance with their values and faith. It was much easier for me to imagine the pressures that places on their children.
Even when characters act badly, the book views them with compassion, and this feels like one of the book’s most important ethical and aesthetic commitments. Did you know from the beginning that this would be a book without villains?
The family is fractured, and to understand how each family member is responsible, the characters return to the decisions they made that had lasting consequences. I wanted to understand their motivations as they arrived at those decisions, wanted to empathize with them and almost forgive them for it, even if they were behaving cruelly or betraying a loved one. Only when that same act is seen from another perspective does it take on heartbreaking dimensions. There is no one villain in this family, because each member has a hand in their undoing as a unit. And that is more frightening to me than a villain: that we can believe we have the best intentions, can be justified in our actions when we see clearly our own perspective, can love one another so deeply, and still not understand our full effect on one another, or how much harm something said in passing can cause, or how that damage done to a loved one boomerangs back to us.