Heartbreak inspired a cause ... and a book

American Mother

Colum Mccann with Diane Foley Etruscan Press

American Mother begins in 2021, as Diane Foley sets out for a Virginia courthouse. It's been seven years since her son James “Jim” Foley, a freelance journalist, was slaughtered in the Syrian Desert.

Foley takes a seat across from Alexanda Kotey, one of a trio of terrorists nicknamed the Beatles, who tortured and decapitated her son, then shared a video of his killing on social media. Kotey, a British-born Islamist militant, has pleaded guilty to numerous counts, including conspiracy to murder Jim and three others. As part of his plea deal, he has agreed to speak with members of the victims' families. So here sits the grieving mother, wrapped in a Libyan shawl Jim gave her, with “a family friend alongside her to help her ask questions.”

That friend is Irish writer Colum Mccann, who plays multiple roles in Foley's story — supporter, participant and ultimately narrator. The novelist had been drawn to the Foleys' story after seeing a photo of

Jim in a bunker in Afghanistan reading Mccann's Let the Great World Spin.

In this unusual literary partnership, her story has become his story, retold through his characteristically agile prose and with strategies he's used in fiction. The result is an innovative, unsettling and compelling narrative that provides insight into the questions of blame and forgiveness that consume Foley — not only regarding Kotey and his militant sidekicks but also the U.S. government and its refusal to negotiate or engage in the backdoor ransom deals that had won release for European nationals from the terrorist organization known as the Islamic State.

For the Foleys, personal anguish met blunt government bureaucracy. Still, Foley wants to believe in America and its institutions. She praises the

U.S. judicial system for bringing another of the Beatles to justice, even as she wonders whether the millions of dollars the trial cost had been well spent.

“I immediately thought of how many things could have been done in the world of hostage advocacy with that amount of money,” Foley writes.

What, after all, was her son's life — or any life — worth?

Jim had been paid a pittance as a freelancer to tell stories he believed the world needed to know. Jim had witnessed the coarse calculation of assigning a price to a life. He had watched a U.S. military sergeant count out $1,000 in compensation for an Iraqi mother after her son, a guard at U.S. checkpoints, was killed.

It was, Foley recalls, as if Jim were “telling his own story in advance.”

There is no easy answer to Foley's private quest to gain insights from Kotey. She decided, after receiving apologetic handwritten letters, to face the man again. This later meeting is also unsatisfactory. Foley gets up, then, in a closing gesture of great grace, reaches to shake Kotey's hand. Why did Kotey, a devout Muslim, accept Foley's outstretched hand?

“She's like a mother to us all,” he says.