The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire 206: Fazlur Rahman, M.D.

"I began the memoir many years ago and wrote a 130,000-word manuscript, even after I cut it down, forgetting that I wasn’t a Stephen King."

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 206th installment, featuring Fazlur Rahman, M.D., author most recently of The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

---

Dr. Fazlur Rahman

Fazlur Rahman was born and brought up in what is now Bangladesh. After his medical education in Dhaka, New York, and Houston, he practiced cancer medicine for thirty-five years in San Angelo, Texas. He is an adjunct professor of biology (medical humanities and ethics) at Angelo State University, a senior trustee of Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and an advisory council member of the Charles E. Cheever Jr. Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

His writings on medical, ethical, social, and scientific issues have appeared in many national and international publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian Weekly, International Herald Tribune, Haaretz, Indian Express, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, Harvard Review, Short Story International, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Oncologist, and Lancet. His cultural and medical memoir, The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey, published in India in 2016, tells about his upbringing and training years, his move to a new country, and his life and practice in West Texas. He and his wife, Jahanara (Ara), have lived there for most of their lives and have raised four children. They love walking in nature and going on wildflower adventures.

—

How old are you, and how long have you been writing?

I am a bit unusual; I am 81. I published my first book at the age of 71, though I have been writing articles, essays, stories, and columns for many publications along with medical journals for five decades. Two of my essays—published in Harvard Review—were selected as the “Notable Essays of the Year,” for The Best American Essays, 1996 and 1998. Another essay was anthologized in a college textbook.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

The U.S. edition of my cultural and medical memoir The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey was published by the Texas Tech University Press on May 12, 2026. The book was first published in India in 2016 and received widespread praise.

What number book is this for you?

It’s my second book to be published in the U.S. My first book was Our Connected Lives: Caring for Cancer Patients in Rural Texas.

The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey is a cultural and medical memoir. It gives a window to a culture of what is now Bangladesh and of the Indian subcontinent, with its peoples, places, sights and sounds, and the natural world; my growing up in that culture with its myths and superstitions; my medical training in Dhaka, New York, and Houston; and my life as a pioneering cancer doctor in far West Texas.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

It’s a cultural and medical memoir. It gives a window to a culture of what is now Bangladesh and of the Indian subcontinent, with its peoples, places, sights and sounds, and the natural world; my growing up in that culture with its myths and superstitions; my medical training in Dhaka, New York, and Houston; and my life as a pioneering cancer doctor in far West Texas.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

My story is astonishing in some way. I was born and raised in a Mullah family, an old-line Muslim clan, in a remote village in what is now Bangladesh, with its hardships and heartaches, its myths and superstitions. The people, places, and cultures that I was a part of have almost entirely disappeared. The temples, mosques, and palaces, though gone, come alive again in this memoir. At the age of 7, I lost my mother, the heart of my family, and soon after, I barely survived kala-azar, a parasitic illness. The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey is an inspiring story of love, joy, suffering, medicine, and achievement that takes readers from the jungles of Bangladesh to my training in leading medical centers in New York and Houston, and the overwhelming emotions that come with this memoir.

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?

It’s a long story and I could write a book about it, although I lost track of some of the happenings along the way. I can give only a brief sketch here, a cautionary tale.

I began the memoir many years ago and wrote a 130,000-word manuscript, even after I cut it down, forgetting that I wasn’t a Stephen King. My aim was to keep the past alive to understand the present. A well-known Manhattan agent was interested and asked me to shorten it, but I did not follow through. I was busy with my cancer patients and the medical, ethical, social, and personal issues that affected them and me. I wrote about all this for publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian Weekly, Newsweek, and Oncologist, among many others.

Over the years, I inserted fragments of my life into my articles, essays, and stories, including two short stories; wrote purely academic articles for medical publications like Leukemia Research; and ruminating and working on two novels off and on.

Along the way, parts of the memoir, in different forms, were published in Harvard Review and The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, which included a picture of my village of Pora Bari and myself as a pre-med student. While doing all these things, my wife, Jahanara (Ara), and I were raising four children. Ara has been an anchor in my life.

When I retired in 2011, I put sustained concentration on the memoir and whittled it down to about 80,000 words. My astute friend Dr. Jerald Winakur, a memoirist, essayist, and poet, loved the manuscript. He edited it and helped it get accepted by a university press. That contract fell through, but later, Texas Tech University, my current publisher, welcomed me.

In 2013, I received an invitation from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences after I submitted the title chapter of The Temple Road. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, was my instructor. She liked my book very much and advised me to focus on my own experiences and feelings and not of those of many peripheral characters, even if they are interesting. Memoir is a matter of selection, not meant to be all-encompassing. Her advice was useful.

Then, a Manhattan agent sold it to editor Renuka Chatterjee at Speaking Tiger Publishing in India. The Temple Road was published in 2016, with widespread positive reviews from the Indian publications. The publisher invited me (and Ara) to present the book at the India International Center in Delhi and at the huge Times of India book festival in Mumbai. We received good reception in both venues. Renuka Chatterjee consistently believed that the book deserved a wider audience in the U.S. However, my agent couldn’t sell it here and her agency got swallowed by a bigger one and I was in a limbo. I moved onto other projects.

I have always been interested in the lives of my cancer patients beyond medicine, which resulted in the book, Our Connected Lives: Caring for Cancer Patients in Rural Texas. It was published by Texas Tech University Press in October 2024, with the help of my caring editor in chief, Travis Snyder. Travis also saw value in The Temple Road and is publishing it in May 2026 as a companion volume.

My older brother, Bazlur Rahman, is a Bengali novelist with a small following. He began writing in high school and sacrificed a lot. I also wanted to be a writer. As a boy, I composed all sorts of humorous poems to amuse others; later, I wrote for college and medical school annual magazines. But my mother’s words: “Someday you will be a doctor, Fazlur, and help people” was imprinted in my mind from a tender age. In her short life, she had seen too much suffering and death without medical care. In the end, I became both a doctor and a writer like many other doctor-writers. (Chekhov is my favorite.) I narrate these stories and struggles in The Temple Road.

Order the book…

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

Recalling the painful past and putting it on paper was hard. But then that was mitigated by the joys and humors that also came into my life. Still, at times inscribing the words the way I wanted, the way they were in my head, wasn’t easy either. Moreover, at first, it was my faulty thinking that having a good story of 130,000 words would be attractive to the editors. That wasn’t so, of course. Only after deletions, additions, and reiterations did it get published.

In 2013, I received an invitation from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences after I submitted the title chapter of The Temple Road. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, was my instructor. She liked my book very much and advised me to focus on my own experiences and feelings and not of those of many peripheral characters, even if they are interesting. Memoir is a matter of selection, not meant to be all-encompassing. Her advice was useful.

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?

I used both real and pseudo names. I checked the facts but wrote my own story. The others read the book after it was published in India. No one has objected to what I had written.

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 tend to gravitate to classics, and I read widely. Some examples: My Reminisces by Rabindranath Tagore; Deshe Bideshe (In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan) by Syed Mujtaba Ali, translated by Nazes Afroz; One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty; Speak, Memory by Nabokov.

I also absorbed from novels how to understand storytelling, especially when the stories involve family, including My Antonia by Willa Cather (one of my most favorite novels) and A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean. He was an inspiration—he wrote this short novel after retirement, at the age of 73. He didn’t write much but what he did was amazing; just read the beginning paragraph of that novel and the scathing reply he gave to Knopf for rejecting it. Finally, The Plague by Albert Camus is one of the greatest medical and social stories of all time.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

Much has been said and written about this already, so all I can add is this: If you really believe in your work, you have to keep at it through life’s adversities and absurdities, which will surely intervene at one time or another, sometimes without warning; and you maybe a genius with ideas but you still have to put those ideas on paper.

What do you love about writing?

Writing helps me to make sense of life and to express myself. Writing lets me share my experiences and observations in the hope that my books will last for a while and readers will glean something out of them to be inspired or soothed in some way.

I have no illusions about this, though—books come and go and very few linger in our memory. How many of us remember the New York Times bestsellers of ten years ago? But my Temple Road is both literal and metaphorical. I took this fear-ridden path through the jungles to go to school every day from my village to my school in Benapole town. If I didn’t begin my tenuous journey on this road, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Then, I had to travel several metaphorical Temple Roads: from my village to Dhaka, the megalopolis, for my medical education; from Dhaka to New York to begin my American life 57 years ago; from Houston to far West Texas, in San Angelo, where I practiced cancer medicine for thirty-five years. And so on. Each of us has our own Temple Road to travel. With humility, I pray that my book will also shed a little light on their paths.

What frustrates you about writing?

As I said above, what’s in my head and what’s on paper don’t always coincide. Also, at times, the intrusions of daily living and its demands.

What about writing surprises you?

Learning by associations while I write—one thing leads to another, which either I didn’t think of, or I didn’t know. Sometimes this also leads me to thinking where I have been or how I have spent my life, as in Annie Dillard’s dictum: “How we spend our days, is of course, is how we spend our lives.” I can’t say that I have faithfully followed the dictum.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

I used to have early morning, evening, and weekend routines during my practicing years. Time, as usual, was in short supply and I wrote whenever I could. Now I write mostly in the mornings and evenings when I can.

Recalling the painful past and putting it on paper was hard. But then that was mitigated by the joys and humors that also came into my life. Still, at times inscribing the words the way I wanted, the way they were in my head, wasn’t easy either.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

Walking in nature, going on wildflower adventures, and visiting national parks with Ara renew my spirit. Listening to music and reading poems myself or to Ara also help. Then sometimes looking at paintings I love refreshes me.

Occasional teaching at Angelo State University and giving talks on diverse subjects make me look into things that perhaps help my writing. Ideas also seep into me for being a college trustee, now a senior trustee, of Austin College; and working with other colleagues as an advisory council member of The Cheever Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

Yes, a novel entitled, A Family Shame. The story takes place in Dallas and Dhaka, Bangladesh. An exceptional autistic boy’s highly educated, elite-society Bengali parents in Dallas can’t accept their son’s limitations and hide him from society and most of their family. The book traces the story of their lives and turmoil as Shuja grows up and becomes a young man.

---

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.