Ayad Akhtar

This is a challenging book. I like to think I'm a "good" person, but I know my outlook is colored by my white privilege, and my American-centric opinions of the world. (Is there a word for this?) But I try to have empathy for people different from me: different colors, religions, sexual choices, country of origin, etc. Learning about the narrator's (who may be the author?) life, his family, his upbringing, education, prejudices against him, etc. reminds me how little I know of others who have entirely different upbringing and world view.
It is billed as a novel, but I believe most of the stories related are true. There may be some things he has fictionalized, and I think a couple of times he says he's changed the name of someone.
What is it like to grow up Pakistani, in the United States? To have your every thought and action questioned simply because of your name, the color of your skin, and assumptions others make about you? This book will make you ask these questions, but will you come up with definitive answers?… (mere)

I was so gung-ho about this book because I’d not only enjoyed the play the author wrote but the teaser about his father being a physician of Trump in the 1980’s sounded irresistible. But after that gang bang beginning, the book slipped into political posturing. Thankfully I had a rare case of patience and continued reading. I was rewarded an exploration of what it would be like to be a Moslem after 9/11. The book continued to fascinate after the author became a Pulitzer prize winning playwright and acquired wealth through investments. The writing about his relationships was gripping.
In the middle of the book there was a sequence dealing with the profound feeling of “otherness”when the author looks in the mirror.
In my complexion alone I saw a person I didn’t recognize, someone who, had I seen him in the school hallways or at the mall or municipal swimming pool, I would have thought did not belong here.
I knew that about myself because I knew that was how I saw others."

From there, the novel/memoir builds to a overpowering ending.
… (mere)

Wonderfully written, beautiful language, and it kept my interest all the way. I was a bit thrown off about how to classify it — it says in big type in the cover that it is a “Novel” but it reads as a memoir with a few obviously fictional bits. But how much is fictional? 10%? 50% Not sure why it should matter but I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t distract me a bit. It wouldn’t have been an issue if it had been told in the third person, lots of novels incorporate some parts of the author’s life history. But by making it a first-person memoir-style story, there was some tension there. What’s fact, what’s fiction? Maybe that was totally deliberate on the author’s part, it wouldn’t surprise me. Anyway, totally recommended as long as you’re ok with the gimmick of a semi-fake memoir. (I suppose even “true” memoirs have some amount of fiction in them, after all.)… (mere)