Mother faces her son’s death with novelist
Their book delves into lives of journalist Foley, man involved in his 2014 murder
Among the scattered notes taped to the door of Irish author Colum McCann’s home office in Manhattan is a photograph of James Foley, the American journalist who was killed by members of the Islamic State group in August 2014. In the picture, he leans against a barricade of sandbags in jeans and a flak vest, reading McCann’s novel “Let the Great World Spin.”
McCann was so moved when he saw the image shortly after Foley’s death that he reached out to Diane Foley, his mother, to offer his condolences — and his help telling her son’s story, should she ever want it. But she missed the message.
She was busy creating the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, an organization focused on protecting journalists and ensuring the freedom of Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad. And she was still grieving a son who had been kidnapped while covering Syria’s civil war and held for 21 months before he was executed on camera, with the footage then released online.
Then, in 2021, McCann and Foley found themselves on the same Zoom call. It was for a Marquette University book club; the group was reading another of McCann’s novels, “Apeirogon,” and Marquette was James Foley’s alma mater, so his mother had been invited.
This time, they connected.
“It was serendipitous,” Foley said, seated next to McCann in his living room. “Colum reminded me of Jim in a lot of ways, just in his goodness and his ability to put very profound feelings into words.”
Within a month of their Zoom call, McCann was visiting the Foleys’ home in New Hampshire to discuss what would eventually become “American Mother,” a hybrid of biography and memoir recently released by Etruscan Press.
“I tried to be in Diane’s head,” McCann said of their collaboration. He would send chapters to Foley, and she would reply, offering direction, corrections and clarifications.
That McCann was interested in the Foleys’ story comes as no surprise; many of his novels are based on real people and events.
“Let the Great World Spin” touches on Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk in 1974 across the World Trade Center, and “Apeirogon” is about the relationship between Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and Palestinian scholar Bassam Aramin. But unlike those books, “American Mother” is a nonfiction account.
Structurally, “American Mother” is an unusual book. Its first and third sections are told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator and focused on a series of exchanges between Diane Foley and Alexanda Kotey, a Britishborn Islamic State militant who in 2022 was sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge for playing a key role in James Foley’s murder as well as in the deaths of three other American hostages.
As part of his plea deal, Kotey agreed to meet with the victims’ families, should they choose to do so. It was an unusual stipulation, and one Foley was eager to accept.
“I felt it was important to talk to Alexanda because I didn’t want him to think we were afraid of them,” Foley said. “I wanted him to know who Jim was, and I also wanted to listen to his story. Like, what brought him to that point?”
Sandwiched between McCann’s accounts of those meetings is a more traditional memoir, written from James Foley’s perspective. This section is filled with personal details: how he used a flashlight to read Tintin stories under the covers; how he wore a baby blue tuxedo to his senior prom; how, in his 20s, he taught English and writing to young women hoping to earn their GED diplomas. Other details came to Diane Foley through other prisoners held with her son and later released, such as how his captors forced him and others to sing a parody of the song “Hotel California” that repeated the line “You can never leave,” and how he remained rooted in his faith despite those cruelties, even helping organize clandestine board games to boost morale.
“I just hope that some of it can resonate with anybody who’s lost someone,” Foley said. The book also has a message, she said: “That, as humanity, we need to build bridges, even with people we can’t stand. We need to have a way to talk to one another.”
Foley met Kotey for three hourslong sessions in a sequestered, windowless room in a federal courthouse in Virginia. No one in her family wanted to join her, Foley said. “They thought it was ridiculous.” But McCann accompanied her each time and asked Kotey questions as well.
McCann and Foley recalled the conversations with Kotey as illuminating, upsetting and heartbreaking. In Kotey, Foley found a bright and complicated man, someone who read voraciously and cried when he shared pictures of his daughters in Syria. “Everyone lost in this, including him,” said Foley, who credits her Catholic faith with helping her maintain compassion for the man who helped kill her son.
“He was much bigger and messier than what I thought he would be,” McCann said. “I like those complications, and I think increasingly, we don’t want to talk about those complications.”
Ultimately, Foley’s anger was directed more at her own country than at Kotey. When James Foley was taken hostage, she said, she was often left in the dark by a government that maintained a strict policy of not negotiating with terrorists. Foley said she spent years being shuttled between agencies and was even threatened with prosecution should her family try to pay her son’s ransom.
Through her foundation, Foley urged President Barack Obama to reform the United States’ international hostage policy. It was in part on her instigation that Obama eventually formed hostage-response groups at the FBI and the National Security Council, and created the position of a hostage coordinator to support families.
More recently, Foley was among those who successfully argued for the passage of the Levinson Act through Congress, which further bolstered resources to bring back hostages.