Interview

Fatima Farheen Mirza talks about her first novel, A Place For Us, which is the first literary work acquired by award-winning actress and producer Sarah Jessica Parker as editorial director of her newly launched imprint, SJP for Hogarth.

A Place for Us is set within a Muslim American family and their community, and explores many universal themes defining those important relationships: love and loss, familial and cultural expectations, honor and betrayal, faith and tradition. There's so much emotion within these pages. Did all of those elements evolve naturally for you as your writing progressed? 

While writing, I never explicitly thought about the characters in relation to these themes, only asked myself--what do the characters want in this moment? How are their needs and hopes in conflict with one another? But I believe that the universal themes you mentioned--love and loss, familial and cultural expectations, honor and betrayal, etc.--are found in every life, in every story to different degrees, even if the particulars of the plot change.

The novel is divided into four parts, with perspectives and voices from several main characters in this family: Layla, the mother; Hadia, the oldest daughter; Amar, the son; and Rafiq, the father. As this story unfolds, we get to see each character's point of view of the same situation, often a small yet pivotal moment in time. Was that a difficult balance for you as an author? Did one character's voice or ...