Laila Lalami

I am kicking off the main portion of my book tour this weekend, with an event at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The festival is a lot of fun; there are tons of readings, conversations, panel discussions, publisher booths, theatrical performances, good food, music, etc.

My event is on Saturday. Here are the details:

Saturday, April 25, 2009
12:30 PM
Fiction Panel: “The Writer’s Ear”
With Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Julia Leigh, Laila Lalami and moderated by Louisa Ermelino
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Korn Convocation Hall
Los Angeles, California

Please note that the festival events require (free) tickets, which you can obtain at select Ticketmaster locations in Southern California. Don’t forget to wear sunscreen!

My friend Maud Newton asked me to write a short dispatch for her blog, about the process of writing about a male protagonist in Secret Son. You can also find out what music I was listening to while writing the novel; check out the playlist I did for the music and culture blog Largehearted Boy (run by David Gutowski). For those who are curious about how I came up with the title of the novel, here is a brief explanation at Bookbrowse. And lastly, here is an interview with Powells.com’s Dave Weich.

My first novel, Secret Son, is being released today. It should be at your local independent bookstore, chain bookstore, and of course it’s available online as well. In fact, readers who pre-ordered the book seem to have gotten it several days early (I’ve already heard from some of them!)

Here’s a little blurb about the novel:

For years, Youssef, a young man from a Casablanca slum, has heard his mother’s stories about his dead and respectably poor father, stories he used as inspiration for his own life. But when a religious group, known simply as The Party, moves into town, he discovers the truth—his father is a wealthy businessman and very much alive. Youssef sets out to find his real father and enters his Westernized world, setting off a chain of events with disastrous consequences. Secret Son, set in modern Morocco against a background of corrupt liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism, explores the struggle for identity and the myriad ways in which the political, the personal, and the religious bind us together.

If you live in any of the cities I’m visiting over the next three weeks, please come by and say hello. I’ll also be doing several radio interviews while on tour. (Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll be on Indiana’s WBOI tomorrow at 10.30 am EST/7.30 am PST, so please tune in.) I will try to post links to print reviews as time permits.

I am heading down to UC Irvine today for a panel discussion, though I’m running late because I just spent the last hour perusing the complete drafts of Madame Bovary, which the University of Rouen has put up online. The university’s researchers have been working on this site for quite some time. (See, for instance, this earlier post.) But this is the édition intégrale, which means that every single page of every single draft should be there. I revise obsessively, so Flaubert is a man after my own heart.

(via the indispensable Literary Saloon)

I am in Indianapolis today, to do an event for the Christamore House Guild. I think the event is already sold out, but just in case here is the information:

April 17, 2009
11 am – 3 pm
Christamore House Guild
Book & Author Luncheon
Indiana Roof Ballroom

Right now, I’m sitting in my hotel room, answering interview questions by email and waiting for my hosts to pick me up. More soon, I hope.

In the Guardian, A.L. Kennedy perfectly describes what it’s like to read one’s work at the proof stage:

Proof pages – nearly the finished article, but not quite. They’re a good sign: they mean your book is almost done, almost ready to pack up its things, get published and amble out to meet the reader. But, then again, proofs are also a source of almost primal panic for the writer. If your proofs are awful, wrong, badly-spelled, oddly-italicised and otherwise dysfunctional, they are a very real demonstration of both your complete powerlessness within the editing process and your witless lack of talent within the writing process. They alarm, containing, as they do, all manner of peculiarities and absurdities which have been added by strangers for no clear reason, along with the plethora of screw-ups which are utterly your own fault. How did you miss that non-agreeing verb? Did you ever know what this final sentence means? Will that character stand up to even the most cursory examination? Why did you ever think this was any use? Can anything within the compass of your meagre abilities be done to remedy this papery hellsbroth of shit? You try to hope so – tinkering with and slashing at your proofs: these representing your final chance of day-saving activity, or even just salvaging a couple of decent paragraphs

After I finished checking my proofs for Secret Son—and I am one of those very annoying authors who wants to make changes even as the book is on its way to the printer—I had regular panic attacks about it. I lay in bed at night, unable to sleep, sometimes unable to breathe. But I have to say that, as time passed (six months, to be exact), I’ve started to let go. Alea jacta est and all that. I’m just enjoying the journey now.

I didn’t get a chance to blog yesterday because I was busy writing an installment for Money Walks, a serial novel that the Los Angeles Times is debuting this week. So the idea is to start a story and then let a group of writers each take turns telling a part of it. The first installment is by Mary McNamara; the second by Seth Greenland. I wrote the sixth installment, which will appear on Saturday. The final installment will be published on the eve of the Festival of Books.

In my class yesterday, we discussed “Tu Do Street” by Yusef Komunyakaa, which appears in his collection Dien Cai Dau:

Music divides the evening.
I close my eyes & can see
men drawing lines in the dust.
America pushes through the membrane
of mist & smoke, & I’m a small boy
again in Bogalusa. White Only
signs & Hank Snow. But tonight
I walk into a place where bar girls
fade like tropical birds. When
I order a beer, the mama-san
behind the counter acts as if she
can’t understand, while her eyes
skirt each white face, as Hank Williams
calls from the psychedelic jukebox.
We have played Judas where
only machine-gun fire brings us
together. Down the street
black GIs hold to their turf also.
An off-limits sign pulls me
deeper into alleys, as I look
for a softness behind these voices
wounded by their beauty & war.
Back in the bush at Dak To
& Khe Sanh, we fought
the brothers of these women
we now run to hold in our arms.
There’s more than a nation
inside us, as black & white
soldiers touch the same lovers
minutes apart, tasting
each other’s breath,
without knowing these rooms
run into each other like tunnels
leading to the underworld.

That line–we fought/the brothers of these women/we now run to hold in our arms. It gets me every time.