Exodus

What is the most challenging aspect of writing memoir for you? How did you determine the structure of the book?
 
The challenge is finding the narrative arc in your own life, as you are living it. There is so much information to sift through, and it takes time to decide what’s important in terms of the story and what isn’t. Life never fits neatly into the lines, so it requires trimming and condensing in order to achieve a semblance of structure. The process reminds me of a photographer friend of mine whom I have often observed as he works on his photographs: he takes candid, unvarnished shots but spends hours cleaning them up and arranging them all into a series that will tell a story. It feels like that’s where the art really happens.
 
How did the process for writing Exodus differ from your experience writing Unorthodox? What is the most gratifying part of the writing process for you?
 
With Unorthodox I had more distance, but interestingly I chose to use the present tense there, in order to feel more immersed in the events as I described them. With Exodus it was all much more recent and I used past tense instead, in an effort to get some distance with which to better see the story. The most rewarding pieces of writing occurred during moments of intense flashback: I’d fall into a trance and wake up five hours later with several thousand words completed. That’s how the scene in my grandmother’s garden developed. I hadn’t thought of that in years and then suddenly it came to me as I was trying to describe the importance of my relationship with her. Writing about what happened in the garden has made the memory much clearer for me, and I treasure it now. I think that’s the most marvelous thing for me about Exodus: it gave me the chance to mine my memory in search of the moments that made me strong, and after that I felt able to “close the book” so to speak, and face the future with more confidence and hope.
 
Your biography mentions that you are working on your next book. Can you share a little bit about it?

Shifting the focus away from the story of where I come from has opened so many doors for me, it’s hard to pick just one! At the moment I’m shooting a documentary film about women in fundamentalist cultures all over the world, and the material is naturally something I feel compelled to write about in tandem. Then there’s the novel I’ve been working on for the past eighteen months, as well as some personal essays, both of which deal in themes that I already started working with in Exodus. I think I’ll always be deeply invested in exploring the survivor identity and the questions raised by the post-war generation. I have a feeling that I’ll do be doing some of that exploring with a film crew, although writing will always be my first love.