AE: It's sort of shifted away from that, which I figured it probably would, but you have to tell people something. And he could still figure in because he's a character I really like. I have to figure out how to do this. I can come up with fifteen short story ideas for you right now, but that long stuff, that you gotta live in -- it's gotta be just so. I had to throw away the first 100 pages of "Towelhead," which is not the greatest feeling in the world. In a way it was fine, because I used stuff from those pages, but it sounded wrong.
AC: It was the voice?
AE: Yeah, the voice was off. She sounded like she was forty. I thought if I was going to write a novel, it had to sound really smart. Then I realized that that was dumb, so I started to treat the novel like a big short story. I had to think that it is not that different. Which it's not, really. There's just a few more elements that you're juggling.
AC: Was it hard to sustain that voice for the duration?
AE: It wasn't hard, but occasionally I would want to do some writerly stuff and then look at it and think, that's nice, but that's not how she talks, and I'd have to take it out. I liked her and I liked her voice; the only thing that was hard is you don't know what in the hell is going to happen. You don't know if you're going to find the ending. I had nothing planned. My hope was that if I stuck to the characters like glue, I would be rewarded with a plot. That was what I thought. And it worked that way. It's a really hard concept to explain... If it ever was hard, it was because I didn't know. I'd think, this sucks and I'm sick of this girl, and I don't even know if it's going to come out, and then I'm going to get bad reviews and I won't have a career.
AC: Did you worry, since some aspects of the novel are autobiographical, that your family or other people might react badly?
AE: I have no loyalty to them. I just don't. I feel that my family, my parents, misbehaved. I don't talk to my father, but I have a relationship with my mother. The nice thing about my mother is that she'll say, "Oh, I was such a bad mother." She'll sort of own up to it occasionally. I don't need her to at this point, but it's nice. But I feel that they behaved poorly. And I'm not trying to punish them, but I feel no loyalty, as far as the material....
It may sound romantic, but art is art. I mean, I'm going to die, my mother's going to die, and the only thing that's going to outlive us both is something that I wrote.
AC: I didn't find the father to be a flat character or a stereotypical character, but he does demonstrate some Arab male stereotypes. Were you concerned about creating a character who might reinforce negative ideas about Arab men?
AE: I did think about that. I thought, if I write this down, certain parts look stereotypical. But all I could think was, "I'm writing my experience. I apologize if my experience is stereotypical." Everyone says there's a reason why stereotypes exist. They're real sometimes. And I'll tell you that a lot of Arab women have approached me or written and said, "This is my family. This is how my father acts."
And a lot of women don't have fathers like that. Arabs are very, very warm people. They're very emotional; I love them. I love my family. My father is different from his family, and sometimes their attitude is, "We don't know where he came from."
I was afraid to meet his family. I didn't meet them for the longest time. They live in Egypt and they would occasionally come to this country. Everyone wanted me to come to Egypt, the extended family, but I just associated them so closely with my father. I just didn't want to meet them. But I finally went, and they're just so sweet...but my father moved to this country. It's very stressful to be an immigrant. I think it would be more stressful for an Egyptian man than for a Swedish man. It's a very particular experience to be a dark person in this country. Anything that's not white. Of course it gets more stressful the darker you are.
