Title: Author Dinaw Mengestu on 'Someone Like Us' (Get Lit)

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the new novel from Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian American journalist, tries to get to the bottom of his father's sudden death and his mysterious life. Mamush has left America behind. He lives in Paris with his wife and young son. Back at home in the US, his mother lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Not far away is Samuel, a cab driver that Mamush knows as his father, even though it's never really spoken out loud. In fact, Mamush's mother seems to want to keep some distance between her son and Samuel.

Samuel was a larger-than-life person with big hopes and dreams. He had a tenuous relationship with the truth and a murky past. He struggled with addiction and mental health. After Mamush learns that Samuel has taken his own life, he sets out on a journey to discover who his father really was. The novel is titled Someone Like Us. It's a story about grief, the American dream, and how much we can really understand another person. It was our choice for our Get Lit with All Of It, October book club. Author Dinaw Mengestu joined us last week for a packed in-person event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Let's hear part of that conversation now.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson Band: City Song]

Alison Stewart: I read in the New York Times that Mamush was your nickname.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yes. In Amarna, Mamush just means little boy. Any little kid you see walking on the street, you could say, "Mamush, [foreign language], come here." Yet every once in a while for some reason, it becomes attached to a child. Growing up, that was the name everyone in my family called me. It's still the name that most of my uncles and aunts call me in part because my name, Dinaw doesn't really exist in Ethiopian, so most Ethiopians think it's an American name. Mamush was a very familiar one, and so it's still a very close term of endearment.

Alison Stewart: How do you go about naming your characters in your books?

Dinaw Mengestu: I realized once this book was done that I'd been secretly naming my characters after myself for quite a while. The narrator of my first novel is named Sepha Stephanos, which was the baptismal name that my grandfather wanted to give me shortly before he passed away. In another novel, the narrator's only referred to as D, which is obviously for my first name. Then, of course, Mamush. Some of it was paying a kind of respect and homage to my family and to the legacy and inheritance that I take from them.

With this novel, it felt like I needed to make myself personally accountable. I knew I was drawing on stories that were based on real people and real lives that were very close to our family, and I felt like if I were going to take narratives that already weren't mine, then I needed to have an equal sense of investment inside of the story myself. I needed to be held accountable both by the reader and, I think, myself.

Alison Stewart: Mamush eventually comes to understand that Samuel is his father, yet he doesn't call him papa. He doesn't call him father. Why doesn't he ever call him father?

Dinaw Mengestu: It's one of the slippery qualities of these characters, as I think has been said before. There's a certain distance and detachment and yet, at the same time, a lot of love, but there's a kind of understanding that there's only so much he's going to be able to understand and know about his mother and about Samuel, in part because their lives are separated by these very radically different experiences, including the terms of how Samuel came to be his father and the relationship that he has with his mother.

They have this intimacy and this love, but there's also a point at which he tells Samuel that I think of you like a cousin or like a close family member. Samuel says, "Well, that's right because that means I have to work really hard to make you believe in our relationship. I have to put in all this extra effort for you to know how much I love you because it might not be very obvious given some of the distances and some of the uncertainty and ambiguity around our relationship."

Alison Stewart: Why does Mamush's mother question the amount of time that Samuel spends with him, with Mamush?

Dinaw Mengestu: I think she knows he's troubled, and she doesn't know how to say that explicitly. There's a way in which all the characters, I think, they live in a cultural context that for them makes it hard to express certain realities that a character might be going through, like what's the word for addiction and for depression for these very hard emotional states that even though we might have the terms for and we use them, I don't think we're always very comfortable with them ourselves?"

I think there are just different ways in which we mask or we try to cover up or we try to acknowledge, but yet at the same time, not really recognize the truth of what somebody's going through. With her, I think she knows that he carries a lot of troubled memories and a legacy with him. She knows she doesn't want his son to get maybe too close to that. She thinks she can protect him by making sure they don't spend too much time. Of course, there's a lot of similarities and echoes between the two.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about how you wrote the book. The book goes back and forth in time, sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks. Why the structure?

Dinaw Mengestu: Some of it was, I think, just wanting to think about the way we live in a present moment where our lives move forward from A to B, but, of course, that forward momentum is constantly interrupted by the past. We are always pulled back by memories, by experiences that suddenly throw themselves at us unexpectedly. Even while we're here, parts of ourselves are always moving in and out of time. I wanted the novel to certainly reflect that. There's also a way in which the characters, they create their own identities through the stories they tell, and they are constantly telling stories. Samuel is constantly inventing different versions of himself.

One way to look at it might be to think, "Well, he has unstable character, or there's something missing." Another way to think of it is that he's controlling, as much as he can, his own narrative, and controlling that narrative means a multitude of stories. That multitude of stories serves almost as a kind of architecture for the novel where I start telling you one thing, and that thing's going to connect me to something else, and if you want to know what this means, then maybe you should also know what that means.

Together, I think, hopefully, they make a constellation of meaning that it's not certainly intended to confuse the reader but just to kind of show the expansiveness and the kind of intricacy of our lives and how one moment is connected to the next. In order to understand who we are, we have to hold together all of these different strands of our past, and what does it mean to create a narrative that can try to do that?

Alison Stewart: Did you think about us, the reader, as you--

Dinaw Mengestu: All the time. Probably more so than ever. In part, and this is where maybe it sounds a little strange is, I thought a lot about how the readers will see these characters and how if there was a way for the characters to see the reader back. One of the things I've thought a lot about was how I wanted to make sure these characters had a fullness and a complexity to their lives but that they were not going to be asked to reveal themselves in a totalizing way that made their experiences reducible to one or two singular events.

I wanted characters who had ethics and an ethical representation which comes with not only a complexity but a respect for the profound mysteries that we carry. The more you know somebody, oftentimes, the more you know how little you understand them. I wanted the characters to have that complexity, but also because they're immigrants. Oftentimes we want those stories to be given over to us. I wanted them to have the capacity to not have to do that, to be able to say, "Maybe I don't tell you the totality of who I am, but I'll tell you so many other things. I'll give you all of these versions of myself, some of which may or may not be true, but they are all equal representations of me."

For me, that was the best way I could think of creating a dialogue between the characters and the reader. It's not just the reader who comes in and consumes the characters, but the characters themselves are talking back and asking you to let them live on their own terms.

Alison Stewart: The book has a great deal of suspense and mystery to it. What are some of the choices that you made in the pacing of this story to keep the suspense, to keep the mystery?

Dinaw Mengestu: I think maybe I mentioned this before, but I really thought at the beginning too that this would feel almost like a detective novel/ghost story, that there would be maybe a central mystery that would resolve and that would center around what happened to Samuel. Then I realized that the mystery wasn't really what happened to him, but, obviously, what are all the things that have surrounded their lives to get him to the place where he was, and not just him, but, of course, Mamush as the narrator. Once the question opened up that way, you realize just how hard it is to answer that question and just how complicated it is.

I wanted to try to set him out on a quest. He almost becomes-- he's a journalist or former journalist who is becoming a bit of a detective. He's trying to figure out, well, how can I pull together someone's experiences and what does it mean to try to create a profile of them through these little trace elements or these little shreds of facts? I wanted that, hopefully, to compel the reader because I also knew that the story has-- there's a melancholy and there's a tragedy, but also, hopefully, love and hopefully something that pulls you along and carries you with them.

Alison Stewart: In Someone Like Us, Mamush is a journalist. I'm going to read a little bit. This is, he is about to get on the flight. He's got his kid on his chest. He's with his wife. It says, "A few months after he was born," his son, "I spent seven days in Calais in the north of France reporting on what was supposed to be the last large migrant camp in Europe. It was the first story I had been commissioned to write in two years, and Hannah insisted on saying goodbye at the train station with our son."

Goes on to say, "There had been an immigration raid in our neighborhood earlier that morning. It was the second since we moved into the apartment whose two bedrooms we would never have been able to afford had they been almost anywhere else in the city. The first raid had been near riotous affair with armored cars and policemen swatting through the neighborhood. The second was far more subdued." What's happened to his journalism career?

Dinaw Mengestu: Some of it, he's destroyed it. He was unable to function, in part because of his addiction, but I think also underneath that, an understanding that he was constantly trying to contort the stories he was being asked to write to fit into a framework that after a certain point in time, I think he realizes he doesn't want to do. There are references to other stories that he was asked to write in the way if he wrote a certain story, he gained a certain amount of attention. The more attention you get, then the more kinds of stories like that you continue to write.

You can start by writing about immigrants so long as there's a tragedy. Then he moves and is rewarded by writing about Africa. As long as he's writing about Africa in certain contexts when it comes to violence and conflict, then that also rewarded him a little bit more. He also knows that I think the stories he's telling don't even come close to capturing the complexity of experiences. There's stories that are being framed for an audience that's very different from the one that are actually being written about. That divide between the people he's writing about and then the stories he's producing, I think, are hard for him to sustain.

Alison Stewart: In that same section, his wife's a photographer, and she wanted to take a picture of where the raid had been. The picture's in the book. It's a picture. There's lots of pictures in the book. Tell us why you have photos in the book.

Dinaw Mengestu: In part because the narrator's wife is a photographer and my wife is also a photographer. It started almost by thinking about other ways of communication that can happen between two people. The idea of an image being able to perhaps express something that language can't always get through, in part because the image allows for multiple interpretations. I can tell you something explicitly, but if I show you an image, there are multiple ways of thinking about and interpreting and encountering that. It began with taking one of her photos and putting it inside of the novel and thinking, "Oh, that actually looks really interesting."

Then as it evolved, I actually asked her to make the photos. I gave her the pages where the photos were being described. I said, "Create whatever you want. I won't do anything to control the image. I won't do any editing. I won't ask you for them to look a certain way." It gave me a chance to have another narrative presence in the novel that wasn't my own. It gave her a voice inside of the novel that I had literally no control over beyond saying, "These are the words that surround around the image, but you can do whatever you want." She took that and she created these really wonderful and beautiful images that tell their own story inside of the novel.

Alison Stewart: When we first meet Mamush, how would you describe what's going on in his marriage?

Dinaw Mengestu: I'd say the marriage is in a rapid state of decline, but he doesn't fully understand why and his own accountability inside of that, whereas his wife sees him much more clearly. He's still incapable of actually seeing himself. One of the reasons why she sends him these images throughout the novel is she's trying to offer him ways to see what's there, to see things that are both beautiful and that are important about who he is and who he's been.

I think that inability to look at himself fully and honestly, but more importantly, to recognize that here's somebody who loves him, who does see him in that totality of that experience and still loves him. That could be a really hard thing to really accept or believe that you are worth being loved. I think he spends so much of the novel hiding and isolating and sequestering himself from that love until hopefully by the end, I think he's out of that. She's constantly calling him back and mean like, "Look, this is a part of who you are, and I know that, and I still love you."

Alison Stewart: He misses his plane and he lies to her about it.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Dinaw Mengestu: I revert to a Flannery O'Connor quote where she talks about the mystery of our characters, and characters are most fully realized when we can't explain why they do certain things, which is always frustrating, like, "No, I need to know why." I say some of it is certainly that hiding part of him. He's unable to recognize, really, where he is emotionally and psychologically. He walks through his life as if things aren't in his control, but, of course, they are.

I think he also knows that he's going back, leaving his family, and returning home is a place that's going to be very difficult for him to manage. Even though he doesn't know that Samuel is dead yet, he knows that going back into that space is going to make him confront certain things that maybe he hasn't before. Chicago becomes both a detour but also, obviously, a way to maybe try to figure out something important about who his parents were before going back to see them.

Alison Stewart: Samuel, he's obsessed with this idea of being in the wrong place, and he thinks Mamush is one of those people who's in the wrong place. What does Samuel mean by the wrong place?

Dinaw Mengestu: He means, I think, probably multiple things. He's, I think, part of why he tells so many different versions of himself, why he at times describes him acts as if he's a doctor is because the versions of himself that he's been able to live so far are incomplete. He hasn't had a chance to live the life that he really wanted, and so he creates and invents new ones. Then there's, I think, also an understanding that, one, there's a framing idea that we have of what a normal life looks like, and they don't fit into that, the idea of understanding where you are in the world.

There's the professor who also tells Mamush, "Tell me about the important places, and I'll be able to understand you." He gives him these examples, and for him, he's like, "Well, that's a framework that doesn't apply to me. I can't talk to you about the playground I grew up in. I can't talk to you about these quintessentially familiar ideas because that's not the way we lived. There's another kind of life that we had. Our lives kind of need to be written about in a way that hasn't necessarily happened before."

Then there's another sense of where you are in place can be a very precarious and difficult thing. Samuel has a very clear sense of that, that being a cab driver, moving and driving through certain parts of America puts him at risk at times in different ways. That risk is something that is shared, certainly, by a larger immigrant community.

Knowing, when I was writing the book, I was thinking a lot, of course, about some of the deportation rates that had begun under the Trump administration, and that sense of precarity, in the way it began to seep into communities, that feeling that you were more vulnerable now than ever before, and you don't trust the government or the country or the state that you're in because it's announced its intentions to perhaps move you away.

Alison Stewart: Samuel likes to draw this distinction between himself and Mamush. He says, "It doesn't matter what I tell you or how long we've known each other, we will never understand each other." How much is that about one being an American, one being an immigrant? Is it intergenerational?

Dinaw Mengestu: I think certainly all of those things, but I also think it goes back to this respect for just how full and complicated our lives are and what it means to make yourself fully known and the expectation that people can be fully known. I think looking across generations and certainly looking across the divide between Mamush, who's raised in America, and they see that in him. They see his relationship to the language. They know the way he moves through the world is less fraught than the way they do. For them,

I think they don't want to let him think that he can fully understand that reality just because he knows them. I think oftentimes we do allow ourselves to think that, "Oh, I know what it's like to have that experience because I had this one." We flatten out these realities to render something more familiar. I think we do that at the great risk of losing the complexity and profundity of some of the most both beautiful and hard experiences that we live through.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with author Dinaw Mengestu about his new novel, Someone Like Us. It was our October Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. We'll have more after a quick break. Stay with us.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson Band: City Song]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Dinaw Mengestu. His new novel, Someone Like Us, was our October Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 2,140 people were able to check out an e-copy and read along with us. Our audience was packed, and as always, our readers had great questions for our author. You'll hear some of those in just a minute, but first, more of my conversation with Dinaw Mengestu.

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Alison Stewart: Samuel struggles with addiction, so does Mamush. Do they have their addictions for the same reasons or for different reasons?

Dinaw Mengestu: That's a good question. I think fundamentally, they probably have them for the same set of reasons, one of which is, I think, the inability to look at themselves honestly. I think the inability to-- I think they're both very good at giving love. I think they're both very flawed in receiving it, which means, obviously, that's terrible for the person on the other end to love somebody who says they love you back but yet at the same time isn't able to commit in an honest and full way. I think that certainly contributes to both of their addiction.

Samuel also, I think, has something beyond that is that he has all of these lives that, again, I think he's still hoping he might be able to live. He makes peace with them at some point in time, but it doesn't last. There's one point where Mamush recognizes that Samuel asks him if he's still writing, by which he means like, "Are you taking care of yourself? Have you learned to live with whatever it was that was destroying you?" To some degree, they share that, the ability to tell your story and to have an understanding of your own narrative and to be honest about that narrative is one path forward. Without that, I think they both suffer from the same addiction.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to the audience for questions.

Participant 1: I was intrigued by the book, also by people's inability to tell the truth to each other. Do you feel that's the human condition in general? Very simple question.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yes. I think we all have the capacity for different kinds of deception and self-deception. I also think there's a slight difference between some of the deception that the characters practice and then some of the invention that they willfully and sometimes joyfully practice. There's, again, a storytelling and self-making that, certainly, Samuel indulges in, which is, I think, a really beautiful part of his character. That, obviously, does become attached to the, I need to hide from the world and I hide through the world through these deceptions. They're linked together, but on one side they were quite beautiful. We write novels, we create poems, we do all of these things where we invent falsities and we give them over. We're grateful for that. We love those experiences. They go hand in hand in certain ways.

Alison Stewart: Back there, hi.

Brian: Hello. My name is Brian. Thanks so much for a beautiful book. I was curious if Samuel's Cross Country Taxi company idea was meant to mirror the Underground Railroad. If that's the case, what did it mean for Mamush to be transported via the system towards the end from Chicago to Virginia? Thank you.

Dinaw Mengestu: That's great. Thank you for that question. There is certainly a desire to want to echo because that idea of the cab company is created in dialogue, I guess, with the Underground Railroad, which less, obviously, extreme circumstances. It's not taking people from slavery, but it was born out of his idea and understanding that he has a community that at times feels risk, and how can he tend to them? This very lovely idea that I can help you get to these safe places, I can help you get to your daughter's house, which might just be something that you imagine you can't do safely.

He's very attuned to that precarity. He's lived through and knows quite well how precarious life in America can be and how easily that sense of stability is damaged. It leans forward from there. What gets to happen with Mamush is, it's like that dream that Samuel has created is realized in a certain way. For him to be carried through that, it is like being carried along by this fantasy of Samuel and being brought to safety by this fantastic idea that he has. Thank you.

Participant 2: Thank you for the book and also some of your earlier work. Big fan. I just wanted to ask, in the tapestry of your works, how does this one fit in and your works in general? Do you feel as though it's a continuation from the earlier themes and characters?

Dinaw Mengestu: Yes. There's a point near the end of the novel where the narrator of my first book, Sepha Stephanos unexpectedly emerges, which for me was just a wonderful moment, partly because that book was almost 20 years ago, and it ends on this uncertain future for this man. To see him come back in the novel and to be in this very healthy space and to be doing something, was quite fantastic for me. Also, I think the book, in some deliberate ways, it's both an extension of and a critique of some of my earlier works. I think in this book, I wanted to try to sit harder and more consciously and more deliberately inside of this Ethiopian American community.

I wanted the book to let the characters gain a complexity that I think I was perhaps reluctant to allow them to have in earlier works. When we talk about the stories and the stories within the stories and the looping inside of it, some of that was a way for these characters to evolve and gain a largeness that I didn't think I knew how to do earlier. Let's say that I know how to do it now. I did want to push these characters, and I wanted to push this Novel into slightly new terrain for me. I wanted it to be in conversation with slightly detective mystery things but to have elements of real imagination inside of it.

Alison Stewart: I listened to this as an audiobook, so I missed the pictures.

Dinaw Mengestu: I know. I heard that before, and I'm always like, "I didn't even think of that, about audiobooks."

Alison Stewart: I also felt, and possibly this was also because it was on an audiobook for me, but I realized that we were in the fantastical part once I was already in it, and then that made me wonder whether there had been a clean break when he goes from being an unreliable narrator to describing a fantastical situation or if that had happened gradually or if it had been there throughout.

Dinaw Mengestu: Yes, that's a great question. It's not a clean break. It is something that there's one critical gesture when he reaches back. When I wrote that, I was a little surprised and almost made nervous by what was happening, and what it might ask of the reader to do, and how it could almost destabilize the rest of the narrative. Because here was something that was quietly announcing a rupture from what we understood to be a reality. Then the more that followed out and played through, the more I understood it's part of the narrative and it's part of the storytelling that the characters engage in.

It's also something that he gets to give to Samuel. It's this realization of a potential experience that wouldn't have been possible except through fiction. It's at that moment too that the novel, I think, really embraces what fiction can do. It's the moment where it becomes really about what and how powerful stories can be because what he is doing at that point is creating a story in conversation with the story that Samuel had been writing. It's the moment of convergence between these two seemingly very different lives and also at the same time, very intertwined lives. They join hands in this hopefully meaningful way for you.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author Dinaw Mengestu. His novel, Someone Like Us, was our October Get Lit with All Of It book club selection.

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Alison Stewart: Up next, for the first time ever, we had a Get Lit dance party. Stay tuned to hear how international superstar Angélique Kidjo got an audience on their feet with an amazing live performance. That's next.