The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #63: Sorayya Khan
"I think it's important to write what’s important to you rather than what you might think the market will reward."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 63rd installment, featuring , author most recently of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir. -Sari Botton
Sorayya Khan is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir and three novels: Noor, Five Queen's Road, and City of Spies, which won the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair. Her work appears in Lit Hub, Guernica, Longreads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Oldster, Journal of Narrative Politics, The Kenyon Review, and more. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and Malahat Review Novella Prize, and most recently, a research fellowship from the American Institute of Indonesian Studies to support her novel-in-progress. The daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, she was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University. Find her at www.sorayyakhan.com.
—
How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’ll turn 63 later in January. I’ve been writing since 1986, when I was 24. That’s 38 years, which is a surprise to me as I’ve never tallied the years before.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
We Take Our Cities with US: A Memoir, published in 2022.
What number book is this for you?
It’s my fourth book, the only one that isn’t a novel.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
We Take Our Cities with Us is a memoir, although it did not start out that way. I set out to write a collection of essays, but when it failed to come together in the way I’d hoped, I turned to memoir. The generosity of the form, its elasticity, allowed me to make a whole from pieces and weave my story into a single narrative.
Turning to memoir coincided with my mother being ill and eventually dying. It also coincided with the polarized moment we all find ourselves in, when borders are being erected everywhere and we speak of identity as fixed, unchanging. Given my own heritage—my mother was Dutch and my father was Pakistani—I wanted to explore the multiplicity of belonging.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
We Take Our Cities with Us is a multicultural memoir of grief and immigrant experience. Written after my mother’s death, it illuminates the complexities of identity and inheritance in a global world. Like me, it’s set across multiple cities and three continents.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
I sometimes think I came to writing through the back door, slipping in while no one was looking. Some writers know their vocation when they’re children, but that wasn’t me. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d gone to university to study political science and international studies. I grew up in Pakistan and always had the idea that I would work for an international organization, travel the world, if only in a small capacity like handing out water in disaster zones. Then I got my first job as a research assistant at such an organization and everything changed. I’m not a numbers person but I was hired to do statistical analysis for Latin American education projects. In the jumble of my days that were filled with numbers and graphs, I asked myself, Where are the people? Who are they? And that’s how I came to character and story, and eventually began to write.
Then my husband received his first teaching job and we moved to a university town. There, at Syracuse University’s MFA program, I met the novelist, Douglas Unger, who invited me into his graduate fiction writing workshop. I sat around a seminar table with people who’d known their whole lives they wanted to be writers and began to understand the devotion that would be required. At the time, Doug said that the biggest thing we’d take away from the workshop was the community we would establish. He was right. I formed friendships in that classroom that have supported me throughout my career, from book to book.
The process of deciding I wanted to write and discovering my subject matter happened concurrently. I can’t say what came first. I knew I wanted to write about how people lived and loved and laughed and died while the larger world and all its political events went on happening all around. We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir emerged from a similar impulse, except the lens was on my life.
The idea for memoir came from a question novelists are often asked: Is it true? Did it happen? City of Spies, my last novel, had just been published, and its first person narrator made it easier than ever for readers to conflate her with me. Eventually, I decided to tackle “what happened,” as in my story, head on—initially more out of curiosity than anything—and see what that story might look like on the page.
Turning to memoir coincided with my mother being ill and eventually dying. It also coincided with the polarized moment we all find ourselves in, when borders are being erected everywhere and we speak of identity as fixed, unchanging. Given my own heritage—my mother was Dutch and my father was Pakistani—I wanted to explore the multiplicity of belonging. I’ve only recently begun to consider the Dutch side of my heritage. In fact, when our children were very small and they’d ask, “Where are we from?” my husband would be the one to remember the Dutch part of me! In writing the memoir, I needed to entertain the possibility that we are not just one thing and that who we are might change over time or in response to the death of a parent or 9/11 or the hanging of a prime minister.
That’s how I came to write We Take Our Cities with Us, a story that weaves together loss and heritage across the cities of my life.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
The toughest aspect of writing this book was accepting that the essay collection I’d written didn’t work. A close second was weighing turning to memoir and recognizing that much of the material I’d spent a year or two writing would fall by the wayside. I tried to keep in mind my father’s adage that hard work is never wasted, but it was difficult.
I learned that my agent was retiring the day I called to tell him that I’d finished my manuscript. At some point, instead of writing agent query letters and collecting disappointing replies, I decided to send queries to small and independent presses and by the end of that week, I had interest from several editors and an offer from Ohio State University’s literary imprint, Mad Creek Books. My first conversation with the editor, Kristen Elias-Rowley, was magical because she understood the book as completely as a writer could hope. While I felt totally supported by Kristen and her team, the process of putting the memoir out into the world came with challenges. For one, the book’s publishing date was affected by COVID supply chain issues. But the biggest challenge was trying to get out word of the book. With much effort, I wrote and placed complimentary pieces (those essays or interviews that are known in the marketing world as earned rather than paid publicity) and set up events. Despite the incredible (astounding, really) generosity of other writers and bookstores, there is no substitute for the publicity machine of a major publisher.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
Well, I wouldn’t have written the memoir if my parents had been alive. I’d been scolded by my mother a few times for lifting details of our lives to use in my fiction. Now I tell myself that the memoir is the type of book she would have liked if it had been written by someone else’s daughter.
But I felt a responsibility to my husband, children, and siblings, and gave them the completed manuscript to read. Much of my story is theirs as well and it was important for me to respect that, but I also wanted to corroborate my memories. I would have changed their names and/or identifying details if they’d asked, but they didn’t. Besides a few dates that my brother corrected, and a close friend of mine who wasn’t happy that I’d changed her name, it passed scrutiny. I’m so thankful for that because if it hadn’t, I’m not sure where that would have left me or my manuscript.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
I was inspired by several books.
I read Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days before I realized I would be a writer. She had a Pakistani father, a Welsh mother, and Lahore was home. Seeing her city and family alive on the page, made me imagine that my cities and my family might also be worthy of the page. Also, her memoir is about grief, which interested me even then. There’s a line in the book in which she mentions being in one time zone (on the East coast) when her mother dies, while her siblings are in another, and because of this her mother remains alive the longest for her. The possibility haunted me, although I did not yet imagine the same for myself.
Alexander Hemon’s The Book of my Lives, a memoir about his Bosnian-American existence is a collection of essays held together by an aching theme of exile and loss—his so different from mine. I loved the possibility that essays could do the work I was thinking I might one day want to do, and I think it is because of his collection that when I turned to the cities in my life, I started with the essay.
About the time I began to write my memoir, I read Nora Krug’s Belonging, a graphic novel of her reckoning with her German family’s World War II past that won all sorts of accolades for the story. But what I most like about it is that it invites the reader into her process of writing and researching. We’re in archives with her, we hold her grandfather’s watch with her, we’re opening old family photo albums with her. I’d already begun to incorporate the process of being a researcher and writer on my pages, but her book gave me confidence.
And then there’s the issue of courage. Kiese Laymon’s How to Kill Yourself and Others in America gave me mine. I’d read the book already when I heard him speak in Ithaca. He read an essay which referenced 9/11 and the US flag, and sitting in the audience that evening, I remember thinking that if he had the guts to write his story, I could muster up the courage to write about my children and my family’s experiences. I owe a great debt to him and his work.
We Take Our Cities with Us is a multicultural memoir of grief and immigrant experience. Written after my mother’s death, it illuminates the complexities of identity and inheritance in a global world. Like me, it’s set across multiple cities and three continents.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
Honestly, I think it's important to write what’s important to you rather than what you might think the market will reward. Writing is solitary, lonely even, and requires a singular level of devotion that’s easier to bear if the work is meaningful to you. Also, when you’re ready, send your work out widely and keep sending it out and believing in it, despite the rejections you may receive. All it takes is one editor to champion your work and shepherd it into the world.
What do you love about writing?
So much. I love being utterly transported outside of myself into a fictional world that is as real to me as the desk at which I sit. I love the feeling of a word, a sentence, a comma, a paragraph, a chapter, a section falling into place. I love that writing stops the clock. I love that time can careen backwards or forwards or stay still, too, on the page.
What frustrates you about writing?
Writing doesn’t get easier. Each time I start a book, I have a brief moment where I think that the books I’ve already written will surely help me to know how to write this one. And yet with each book, there are always multiple drafts involved and, as ever, missteps. I do think I have a better understanding of what writing a book entails, and that’s helpful, but does it get any easier for me? No. That’s frustrating.
What about writing surprises you?
I’m surprised to have fallen in love with revision. After years of bemoaning the process, I see revising as a hopeful act, full of opportunity, and inseparable from writing. Whether putting pen to paper for the first time, or returning to that piece of paper for the hundredth, the optimism inherent in writing surprises me.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times?
My writing practice changed over time. When my children were small, I wrote during their naps, and when they went to school, I wrote in the five hours after I dropped them at the bus stop and before I turned to the daily chores of running a household, like cooking and doing laundry. Even then, mornings were always the best writing time. Now I wake up, make coffee, and sit in front of my computer, as if I need to be there when the sun rises in order to enter my dream world. I don’t have a daily word count or require myself to write new words every day, but I do need to touch base with my manuscript, if only to re-read what was written the day before.
I learned that my agent was retiring the day I called to tell him that I’d finished my manuscript. At some point, instead of writing agent query letters and collecting disappointing replies, I decided to send queries to small and independent presses and by the end of that week, I had interest from several editors and an offer from Ohio State University’s literary imprint, Mad Creek Books.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
Is reading a creative pursuit? I feel like reading fuels my writing. I’m always learning from other people’s books and sentences, whatever the genre. In a more recent activity in the last five or six years, I learned how to throw clay on the wheel and while I’m still a novice potter, I often think about the similarities of making something out of clay and writing. Sometimes form emerges from the clay, and other times, one must impose it.
Both mediums are surprisingly flexible, but in either, if you don’t get the structure right, your work collapses. Like many writers, I like to walk and oftentimes, even if I’m listening to a podcast or an audiobook unrelated to my work, an idea or a solution to that morning’s writing problem will come to me. Walking grounds me in all sorts of ways and I can’t imagine writing without it.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I’m fully absorbed in writing a new novel. A small detail that I came across while researching my memoir, a ship’s passenger list published in a colonial Dutch newspaper, was the initial spark. I dare not say too much more at this point except to offer that I recently returned from a research trip to Indonesia and that my novel has yet to include any mention of Pakistan, which would be a first for any of my books. After writing a memoir, I’m so happy to be back inside a fictional universe.
"In writing the memoir, I needed to entertain the possibility that we are not just one thing and that who we are might change over time or in response to the death of a parent or 9/11 or the hanging of a prime minister." and also "I tried to keep in mind my father’s adage that hard work is never wasted, but it was difficult." and the comparison of writing and making something out of clay, and well really the whole thing. so good!!! ... adds all her titles to my already overlong To-Read list...