A thousand reasons to read Splendid Suns

There was a period of many months when my standard answer to, "What good books have you read lately?" was a simple three-word response: The Kite Runner. Even after I had long since read it, making it not a "lately" book at all, I'd still come back with the same answer.

I've tried to distinguish what moved me so much as a reader that I'd be so enamored of a book set in war-torn Afghanistan, told from the point of view of a man, and that was so desperately sad in places. I can only say Khaled Hosseini paints humanity in such simple, eloquent strokes, if you're human, you can't escape being drawn in: hook, line and sinker.

So I was fairly anxious to get my hands on A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini's newest title, released just last month. My mom, an avid reader like me, got a copy the day it released and had it with her on the plane as we traveled together to my son's graduation. Airline attendants would walk by, see the cover in her hands, and say something like, "Oooh! You've got it! When did you get it? Have you started it?" And for several minutes there was no talk of cabin service or $1 earphones or locating the exit nearest you, just chatter about The Kite Runner and the new book, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Mom finished the book a few days later and handed it over to me, beaming. I tried to finish the book I'd started while waiting for this one. I couldn't do it. I set it aside after only a day and packed my bags for Afghanistan.

It was a trip I won't soon forget.

As in The Kite Runner, Hosseini holds nothing back just because it's ugly. War, civil unrest, terrorism, misogyny, hatred, fear, despondency — these aren't pretty. But the world in which Hosseini's characters are placed is the real world, not some made-up land where nothing ever seems to go right. I think that's what grabs me in the tales Hosseini weaves: their realism. It's easy to care about people who seem real. And that's the hallmark of a great fiction writer: the ability to develop characters the reader cares about deeply. Passionately. Because they become real to you.

Splendid Suns chronicles the lives of two women, beginning with their separate childhood years and ending when their lives have been entwined with the unforgettable bonds of suffering and sacrifice. The setting, Afghanistan, is a character unto itself, as it was in The Kite Runner. It is like this impassive entity that refuses to intervene when it seems it should. "Make it stop!" I found myself saying to this faceless character, often. I could almost hear it saying back to me, "You make it stop," which was of course impossible. This powerlessness was frustrating to me as the reader, but expertly used to the story's advantage. I felt the powerlessness of the characters to change their circumstances. Even when they tried, they could not change them. I tasted this powerlessness on every page.

This doesn't mean there weren't moments of tender beauty and grace in Splendid Suns. There were. That's what kept me reading. And the ending is particularly satisfying. But like its older brother, A Thousand Splendid Suns is the kind of book that clings. Haunts. Permeates. Indwells. I long to write a book that would do the same.

I have a new answer to the question, "What good books have you read lately?" It is now a four-word answer.

Welcome Maureen Lang

My very talented friend Maureen Lang is stopping by the Edge today to chat about her new book (with its dazzingly beautiful cover), The Oak Leaves. Maureen is a relatively new novelist on the Christian fiction scene, but she made a lovely splash with her debut novel last year, Pieces of Silver. as she was just nominated for a 2007 Christy Award in the first novel category.

I love it when I know the story behind the story. In The Oak Leaves, Maureen weaves a tale about a mother whose child suffers from Fragile X Syndrome. Maureen knows the subject matter like few do. She lives the life of a mother whose child has this disability.

There probably aren't many books that mesh the hard realities of life mothering a disabled child with a love story, but that's what Maureen has done with The Oak Leaves. Here's what you'll find on the back cover: "Talie Ingram has an ideal life: a successful, devoted husband; a beautiful one-year-old son; and another on the way. But her world is shattered when she discovers a shocking family secret in the nineteenth-century journal belonging to her ancestor Cosima Escott. Only in reading Cosima’s words can Talie make peace with the legacy she’s inherited and the one she’s passed onto her son."

I'm also a fan of ancestral journals that breathe life into contemporary stories, so I can't wait to get my hands on The Oak Leaves. Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about it: "From the very beginning, Lang, a romance novelist andauthor of Pieces of Silver, deftly navigates back and forth in history… It’s Cosima's lingering voice—her determination and faith—that inspires Talie to reconcile her son's diagnosis of fragile X syndrome (a disability Lang's own son suffers from) with her belief that God is merciful."

Very cool!

Here's Maureen to tell us more:

Edgewise: What did you learn about yourself as a writer as you wrote this book. As a mom?
Maureen: I learned so much on both counts! As a writer, I learned to separate the fictionalized story from some of the actual events in my life that parallel the contemporary portion of this book. It was so freeing! I wanted to include the emotion behind my experiences, but not necessarily my experiences. The story had to come first. And as a mom? This story made me delve into what I've learned about myself through having a child with a disability. I learned God really does have a plan for me, and Grant, my disabled son, is a huge part of that plan. I'm by no means a perfect mom, but I've learned I'm a lot stronger than I thought.

E: I love your cover and your title! What does the title signify?
M: I really love the cover, too, the colors and the warmth. The child portrayed has a very similar skin tone to my own son, which I also loved. The title was inspired by a friend of mine, who told me about an old custom of how family trees were once drawn. The male names were inscribed on the trunk and branches, while the female names were put on the leaves, probably because they're names would change once they married. So the Oak Leaves in my book represent the women portrayed in my novel - their names were put on a family tree, on oak leaves.

E: Was this book harder to write or easier because of your intense familiarity with the subject matter?
M: Some of this was undoubtedly easier, because I didn't have to research what the symptoms of Fragile X are, how a diagnosis might be made, how the genetics work and impact an entire family. But on the other hand, I had to work harder on the contemporary part because it was so close to home, sometimes too close. I had a hard time separating myself from the heroine since she had so many of my experiences - it kept hampering my progress. I didn't want the character to represent ME so closely, and yet I struggled to find a comfortable distance that had a little of me but rather more of someone who fit into the story, with other characters around her who were entirely made up - well, except for the husband, who was also inspired by my real-life husband. There are a couple of scenes in the book that are pretty much word-for-word accounts of things we went through that fit the story. (I'll let the readers guess which scenes those are!)

E: What are you working on right now?
M: I just turned in to Tyndale the sequel to The Oak Leaves which will release in Feb 08. It's titled On Sparrow Hill and it, too, has a dual thread, one contemporary and one historical. I love being able to mix settings. Some of the same characters from Oak Leaves show up in this story, but the focus shifts to Beryl Hamilton in historical Ireland, and to a modern-day descendant of Peter Hamilton in a contemporary English setting. Very romantic, which made it a lot of fun!

Thanks for visiting the Edge, Maureen. Have a great Monday, everybody.

Life, ah, finds a way

I love that line from the movie Jurassic Park.

"Life, ah, finds a way."

Remember it? It's uttered early in the movie by the annoyingly right Dr. Malcolm well before any of the supporting cast have been eaten. He had just been told the dinosaurs at the park were all engineered to be female, that there would be no breeding, that everything at the park was masterfully under control because the scientists who ran it had a leash on life and had drawn it in tight.

And of course they were splendidly wrong.

It's a great line. Creation is indeed bigger than we suppose. When God gave Adam lordship of the Garden, I think limitations were also given and that they still exist. We can manage the Garden but we can't change what it is. Or recreate it. Or make it our slave.

We can only dabble with the orignal. Sometimes we come up with something lovely. Like the Black Velvet apricot I ate yesterday; which is the intriguingly beautiful pairing of a plum and an apricot. Sweet, velvety soft, an enchanting shade of midnight for its outer flesh, a soothing beige for its inside.

And sometimes we come up with something that it is lovely when it doesn't run amok and devastating when it does. I've nothing against using fertility drugs but I shudder at what they allow us to do and what they routinely do all of their own. Two sets of sextuplets were born prematurely last week, one set in Minnesota, the other in Arizona. Three of the six born to the Minnesota couple have died. When the couple found out early on that six human beings were growing inside the wife's womb, they were counseled to do the impossible: dispose of some of them from the get-go. They couldn't do it. I couldn't have either. Capricious life-taking should never be that easy.

Dr. Theodore Nagel, a University of Minnesota infertility specialist, said in a Star Tribune article on the surge of multiple births: "The problem is that you're walking this line between getting pregnant and getting too pregnant." That's the key problem here. We can't control the experiment. "Too" stands outside our boundaries.

Life is finding a way despite the confines we dare to place around it. It always will.

I offer no answers. Just an observation. We've forgotten the Garden is a wild thing. Untamed. Untameable. That's what makes it breathtakingly wonderful and completely other. It's what also makes it never completely ours.

Fiction that lectures sweetly

I'm a big fan of books that teach me history within the framework of a terrific story. It's why I loved The Kite Runner, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, Lilla's Feast and Four Spirits. I like being tutored on past perspectives that are real while immersed in the world of fiction; the world of the not real. It's a lovely pairing.

I am especially fond of novels that whisk me away to another culture and make me ache to see it, taste it and touch it for myself because it seemed so very real when I was lost inside the pages. Snow Flower and The Secret Fan by Lisa See, the book I read while moving from one state to another, is about the deep bonds of friendship and the mess we make of things when we think we know everything about the people we love. The tale is set in 19th-century China and centers around the custom of footbinding as well as an actual secret written language among Chinese women that dates back a thousand years. Both culturally distinct customs provided the framework for revealing a society that fettered its women one moment — footbinding, arranged marriages, servitude, son-bearing — and empowered them the next: the secret language freed them.

The story is told through Lily's eyes, now in her 80's, about growing up with Snow Flower, a young girl she was paired with when she was seven to be her lifelong laotong, her "old same." Her laotong would be a friend and companion for all time, chosen for her because they would complement each other, would help them secure better marriages, would enable them to endure the rigors of being a woman in a culture that only appreciated men. As the girls grew up, they chronicled their entwined life journeys on a fan. It became a secret journal of their shared experiences, experiences which weren't always pretty. See's ability to have Lily tell the story without minimizing her faults was one of the things I liked best about it. That, and the power of her story to reveal how we pride ourselves on knowing so much, on being able to figure everything out, and how much we really need to shut up and listen, instead of talk and assume.

This is one of those books that make you writhe at times, taste at others, cry and laugh, and above all, make you glad you live in the time and place in history in which you do. I found myself massaging my feet while I read, assuring myself I still had all my toes and they were all still in the place God put them when He knit me together. But I also found myself massaging my mind as I absorbed the lessons learned when I placed myself in fiction's quiet lecture hall: We don't know everything. We assume too much. We love less than we are capable of loving.

A great read.

What I should have done

Anytime I speak about writing or dream-following or the amazing providence of God, I am asked how I got here. What was the road to publication like for me? Most of the time I can see one of two things in the eyes of an asker who is also a writer: hope or dread. Can I expect the road to be wonderful or terrible? those eyes say.

If I have the time I tell them it is both. It is wonderful and it is terrible. And for pity's sake, have no more expectations. Goals are good, dreams are empowering, passion is essential, but expectations just don't seem to figure in to getting published. They did far more to trip me up than build me up. Because what you expect is rarely what happens.

I tell fellow novelists waiting for that big break that there are only two things you need to get a book published: 1. An incomparably well-written story 2. Perfect timing. Only one of those things can the writer control. They hold sway over the depth of their prose but they are not in control of time. You could write a stellar novel about a boy who learns he is a wizard but your timing would be splendidly off if you expected to see it published. Timing is everything.

But here's the good news. There is something you can do to improve the quality of your writing and your knowledge of what is timely and what isn't. It's something I should have done in the beginning and didn't but which I heartily recommend to any writer at any point in the journey. Go to a writers' conference. Just schedule the time, invest the money and go. Which one is best for you largely depends on where you are at with your writing project and who it's for. If you write fiction from an inspirational worldview, may I encourage you to attend the American Christian Fiction Writers annual conference in Dallas. The dates are Sept. 20-23. I am one of many workshop leaders who will be sharing at the conference. In addition to a strong panel of teachers and leaders, editors from major publishing houses and literary agents will also be available for personal appointments. This is really the best reason to attend an conference like this one. There is no other way to have one-on-one time with an acquisitions editor or agent. Sending in your completed and (gasp!) unrequested 350-page manuscript just doesn't work anymore. It's personal contact that gets your foot in the door. And this is what happens at the ACFW writers' conference.

God was amazingly kind to me to get me inside this industry without that personal contact upfront. But it doesn't usually happen that way. Plus, I missed out on all those opportunities to build friendship connections in those early days. I failed to see writers' conferences as CEUs, an investment in my future, a fantastically SMART way to improve my writing and my network of contacts.

So if you're an aspiring author or you know of one, take this advice to heart or pass it along. You don't have to go to a writer's conference to get published. But it sure does help. In more ways than one.

A very, very, very fine house

There were days the past few weeks when it was difficult to see the road ahead had an end to it.

Dismantling a home is more than just packing up your belongings and watching them being loaded onto a truck. It is something like being reinvented. It is exciting, excruciating. and exhausting.

I knew the house I just moved out of would not be my home forever; I am not a native Minnesotan and I was only able to appreciate its seasonal charms for the first three years of the 14 my family and I lived there. I knew the day would come when we would leave and head back to the West Coast; to where life began for us and where family members yearned for us to return.

But something happens to the square footage you inhabit when you raise kids within it. It becomes a member of the family. Really, it does. It was Home to your kids — and to you — and you felt safe, wanted and needed there. It's where the sweetest of memories were made. It was a laboratory like no other.

I am sure I will be able recapture those same feelings in my new home but it will not be the same. Three of our four kids are all grown up; this new home will be Mom and Dad's place to them. It will be home, but it will be different.

There's nothing I want to change about the twist in the road I've just taken. But I am aware of the emotional toll it has had on me, and it's best not to ignore that which begs to be noticed. I can almost hear my old house calling out to me, "Don't forget me, don't forget me." And I am calling back to it, "Impossible to forget you, impossible."

Now that the major part of the move is over I am back from the blogfast and will post here again with devotion if not regularity on Mondays and Fridays. Thanks for bearing with me during a time of transition that I would only recommend to those who have plenty of fortitude, pluck and Advil.

It's nice to be back.