Club Friday Q&A: A Journalist on Writing About a Decades-Old Family Secret
By STACY LEE KONG
Image: Lisa Vlasenko
Even if I didn’t know Sadiya Ansari, I would have added her debut book, In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life, to my to-read list immediately. A deeply reported combination of memoir, creative nonfiction and super compelling history book, In Exile delves into a family secret: decades ago, Ansari’s daadi (grandmother), Tahira, abandoned her seven children to live with a man from Karachi in a tiny village in Punjab, and would remain estranged from them for almost 20 years. But the book isn’t just a family history. It also explores what was happening socially, culturally and politically during that time period, and uses that to contextualize Tahira’s decisions—and the decisions that were made for her. But of course, I do know Ansari, so I was extra excited not just to read the book, but also to talk to her about why she wanted to tell this kind of story, her reporting and writing process and how she navigated her family’s feelings and expectations around this project. Read on for (a condensed version) of our chat.
In the book, you break down the way that your grandma’s story unfolds for you, starting when you were a kid. When was the first moment that you actually saw this as a book, though?
That’s an interesting question because I initially wrote this as a four or five-page proposal for a bigger feature. I wanted to do the Banff literary journalism residency but I kept getting rejected. In 2019, I eventually did an autofiction memoir residency there run by the editors of Electric Literature, which was great. Jess Zimmerman was my mentor there, and after that, I decided this was going to be a book. Years before, before she was my agent, I’d had a conversation with my now-agent, Samantha Haywood, because a friend of mine, Rachel Geise, had referred me. I sent her a proposal for a 10,000-word piece and the one thing Sam said to me after looking at that proposal was, ‘This is great, but go deeper.’ I needed more layers, which was such an exciting thing to hear, because in journalism, all you hear is to simplify it. Or it’s like, “This is too complicated, you can’t get into this stuff.” Then I went on a trip to Pakistan with my dad in 2018. After that, I didn’t know if I had enough but I knew I had enough for at least a longer memoir-type of piece. It wasn’t until 2020 that I finally felt like, “Okay, I’m just gonna try to do it.”
I’m really curious about the process of writing a book, because I feel like I have no idea how to do that. Like, articles? Of course! But a book? So, how did you know what you were doing? And how did the scope and the format shift as you were reporting?
I didn’t really have any guidance on how to do this kind of thing. I didn’t really know anyone who had [written a book like this], and I guess I still don’t. In the beginning, I never thought I could get all that stuff about what happened to my grandmother when she was away from her family, so I thought this book might just be about what happened leading up to separation, and how they were able to reconcile as a family, and what happened to the kids in between—because it was tough for them, and that’s also its own story that I don’t get into too much into the book. The book was supposed to be about shame, and how shame keeps people in situations that are not in their self-interest. In South Asian cultures, and in a lot of different cultures, you’re taught that things are a certain way and that is how you have to be. That’s how I grew up too. It was like, this is how you have to be and if you’re not this, you will not be loved and accepted, which is not true. My grandmother’s story was so interesting to me for that reason. It’s not like everything went back to normal, necessarily—if you’re a mother who’s left her children for a long time, your relationship changes—but the fact that she could return to the family was a huge indication that we get to decide what the rules are. So, I kind of thought that was the arc of the story.
But then when I went back to Pakistan the second time, I found a lot. Before that, I had been working with Sam on how to structure the book, and she said that I need to put more of myself in the story because I’m going to be the person that a lot of people relate to—not to say that other characters aren’t relatable as well, but a lot of us are kids in the diaspora. In my case, I was born in Pakistan but grew up in Canada, so I felt this sense of dislocation. I don’t fully know my family mythology to the same degree as other people do just because I didn’t grow up around it. So, Sam suggested I write the intro that way. Then I remember talking to Jess and she said to me, “We need your social location in the whole book.” Anyway, that was incredible advice and that’s why I decided to do alternating chapters of nonfiction and creative nonfiction.
I agree—I needed you in the book. Maybe I’m just biased because I know you, but I felt like I needed that modern grounding. You are the one who explains the parts of your culture that I’m not familiar with, but you’re also giving stats, you’re bringing in experts, you’re quoting people, books and academics. What made you decide to do that, though? And was that intentional from the beginning, or did that also unfold naturally?
I’m glad I could be a guide for you. One thing I want to say about what you said before, about not knowing how to do this: I think you absolutely know how to do this as a journalist. When I started as a baby intern at the Star, one of the editors said to me, you can write a book—it’s just features back to back. Every chapter is a feature or a personal essay. So, that’s how I think about my chapters.
As a journalist, I wanted to do journalism. I wanted to bring in all the things that I was learning and to provide context for people who either are like me and might be from a similar culture or similar place, or might not have any concept of these things, or might be from there but don’t know anything about Pakistan or India or Partition. You might have no idea of the scale of it and [reporting] is a way for you to understand what was happening around the time of this very personal story. Seismic shifts were happening around my grandmother at that time and she was also experiencing those shifts in her life.
The thing is, we’ll never really know [all the details]. In journalism we do so much attribution, but the grandmother chapters are more creative nonfiction. So I’m taking all the interviews people have given me and I’m taking historical records to try to create a more vivid picture for people. When you’re in journalism, you have to decide a version of events based on all the information that you have. But in this case, it was tricky, because I had to include multiple memories and you don’t want people to feel unheard, right? So, I have this narrative from my uncle [and these other perspectives that he didn’t know].
What you’re saying about having to construct a version of the events based on the evidence that you have is an important thing to know for any book, but especially this one. When we talk about your social location and the cultural aspect of it, it’s not just that you have interpersonal relationships, you also have community expectations and larger familial expectations. How did you navigate that?
Familial duty is huge, and I definitely felt the weight of that. I had my dad with me on this journey, and in the beginning, he was a bit more like, ‘Yeah, sure, let’s do it.’ But he maybe didn’t realize what it entailed. I had to figure what he was comfortable with, and I had multiple conversations with aunts and uncles to figure out what they were comfortable with. And at the end, and as a more technical thing, I had an incredible fact checker, Michelle, who speaks Urdu, Punjabi and English. She had a conversation with every single major interviewee to back up some of the conversations I had two years ago.
I was nervous because these are people in my life who I love a lot. I think what they did for me was so generous—I couldn’t have done this without them. They went their whole lives never talking about this huge trauma and then all of a sudden, I’m asking questions, and they’re answering them, which isn’t something that I take lightly. And there’s a bigger thing around mistrust of journalists—when people see a quote and it doesn’t reflect what they said, I think that that can be jarring. It’s happened to me; I had a fact-checker call me once and I was like, all of these things are not accurate. I never want someone to have that experience. The other thing I think protects the people I interviewed a bit is that in the nonfiction bits, I don’t quote people. I don’t attribute directly. I wanted to avoid conversations like, “Oh, you told her this?” I didn’t want people to feel responsible in that way.
I wrote a little bit about trauma-informed journalism towards the end of the book, and one part of that is giving people a heads up when something’s coming out and giving them a heads up about what you used. And I think especially if you’re working in long-form, sometimes it’s six or eight months, or a year before a story comes out. I work a lot on migration stories [as LGBTQ+ commissioning editor (Africa and Asia) at Context, a project from the Thomson Reuters Foundation] and I’ve spoken to a lot of asylum seekers, and it all takes a long time, So for instance, if there’s not a fact checker who’s going to call them, I’m going to send them a list of questions [to make sure the piece is accurate]. I think that’s an ethical thing to do as a story-taker. And even in this book, I feel like I’m a story-taker in a lot of ways. But there was something about interviewing family and the journey my dad and I went on where I did feel like he was my storytelling partner in some of it. He read a draft of the book in September. I was in Vancouver, and it was six in the morning when he called me. We were chatting and he told me that he read it, but first, he had to tell me about the mistakes that I made, because he’s a brown dad. All jokes aside, though, he told me that he couldn’t believe how much research I did. He saw me do some of the interviews, but he didn’t know about all the other research I was doing. He even learned so much that he didn’t know. He told me what all Asian kids want to hear from their parents, which is, “I’m so proud of you.” Even though my parents do say that to me all the time, and I don’t have any issues with that necessarily, it’s still nice to hear.
That conversation made me feel a lot more calm. My mom read it, too, because she had been there for part of the journey and I was curious about her perspective. I thought about whether I would share it with all my aunts and uncles, and I didn’t because I felt like things were not attributed to them and I knew I was going to use a fact checker. But I wonder about that decision, too. Was that the right decision? Should everybody have read it?
I spent a lot of time as I was reading thinking, ‘How could she know that? That feels so real, but there’s no way she could know that.’ So, I really want to hear about that process of writing creative nonfiction, especially as a journalist who is not used to writing in that way, I’m guessing.
I first started to write in a way that felt freer to me, because when I first started writing about my grandmother’s life—we’re talking about the year that she got married, which is 1936—it was very much like, ‘this happened, and then that happened, and then this happened, and that happened,’ because that’s how people were telling me the story. I had to think about how to make that experience deeper, for me as a writer, but also more enjoyable for a reader, and also how to fill in the contours of her life. There’s a paragraph that opens the first chapter about my grandmother on her way to get married. She’s going into a horse carriage with her father and going across town. I knew she lived in Nampally, which is a part of Hyderabad, and I knew that my grandfather lived a little bit outside of Hyderabad in a place called Ramanthapur. I looked at the distance of it, I looked at what was happening at that time, and I looked at a lot of archival photos to figure out how she would get there. So, when I’m writing the horse and carriage thing, on one hand, I’m looking at all the landmarks and the things that you would encounter on the way and making sure that they existed at that time. When I say it took two hours, or how many ever hours, that was because I looked up a bunch of different sites on how long horse and carriage rides would take. Then I also had someone who is a cousin of my grandmother, who’s still alive and got the chance to talk to her. I asked if horses and carriages were the primary way people got around at that time, and she said yes. But I couldn’t find that information in an academic article. So, that’s one example of how a paragraph like that comes together.
As you’ve said though, there are some things you could actually never know. So when you describe her shawl as cream, did that give you anxiety? Or was that freeing?
I think at first and at times, it did give me a little bit of anxiety. I want my journalism to be true. I think being an anxious person is good for my journalism. I’m currently working at the Thomson Reuters Foundation; we’re reporting with Reuters principles, and the bar is very, very, very high. We don’t even reference other people’s reporting sometimes—we have to go find it out [ourselves]. That’s a very high bar, which is good.
The details that aren’t harmful to the story, I didn’t care about as much. But I didn’t make up any events. I didn’t make up quotes. Any quote that was in there was something someone else had heard or something someone had told me. I tried to have some rules. But I’m also talking about how she’s thinking and how she’s feeling. I’m trying to close the gap between her experience and the reader’s experience.
There’s a line at the very beginning, when you were talking about who can think about the things you’re exploring in this book. You explain it as, there’s the generation that experiences these things, and then there’s the generation that is just trying to survive. And then there’s the youngest generation that has the space to think about what it means that these things happened, or to even acknowledge the trauma that happened. I think you might be quoting someone who said, “I have met young people with old memories.” Sadiya, I actually had to stop reading. I don’t have a question. I just want to talk about that.
That’s Elif Shafak. She’s a Turkish-British writer, and I love her work a lot. She writes about a lot of migration stories, but also stories around dislocation and people who don’t always fit in. I heard her on a Monocle podcast talking about this in particular. It really struck me, which is why in the book. I think it’s what we all think about. And, I would also encourage people to do this kind of work. You don’t have to write a book to look into your family history. And sometimes it’s just asking someone something, I think especially grandparents. My grandmother was the last grandparent, and she was the only grandparent I knew well. Sometimes it’s hard to stop and ask your parents about what it was like for them growing up, and sometimes they want to talk about it and sometimes they don’t. But you might learn something super interesting.
You’re writing about this place, culture and religion in a particular social, cultural and political time. Were you thinking about how this book might be perceived outside of your community, as you were reporting and writing?
I think if I was reporting a story, I would think about that more. Because I’ve covered Islamophobia for a long time, I think I would make certain considerations around political climate. But in the book, I just didn’t do that. The book was about specificity. To me, the book is for people like you and me, and anyone else who enjoys it. But I also don’t want to pander, and that comes down to a lot of things like the words I use and the details I include.
When I first had the book out for proposal, I got a bunch of rejections. They were all super nice and editors liked it, but they didn’t really understand where it would fit in the market. This was a comment that I got constantly—the relatability, and the scalability, came up again and again and again. The truth is, people decide whether or not they think you’re sellable. If you have a large social media following, maybe that’s an indication that people are going to read you, for instance. And publishing is a really hard game to be in right now for absolutely everyone across the board, unless you’re Matthew McConaughey writing your memoir or whatever, right? So I want to acknowledge that. But what drove me a bit was this idea that the book wasn’t marketable, or relatable enough. It just kind of felt like… there 1.5 fucking billion of me on earth, what do you mean? And why is it that in a book like mine, culture becomes the top line instead of the story or character? No one’s going to say Cheryl Strayed is a white woman who’s going to be read by only white women because the narrative is incredible and she’s a compelling person. When you flip it, it’s a ridiculous thing to say and honestly, a lot of anger about that fuelled me. I just wanted to write for people who want to read the kind of thing that I want to write.
I’d been travelling a lot, so I’ve been asking people what their family secret was. And they’d tell me something wild, and then we would start talking about how we never talked about these things, and how we want to find out more. There are so many points of what you can access in the story. I think the best stories are the ones that are very specific to a person—and I also think that there are going to be access points in this story, because we’re human. Like, we’re talking about migration, we’re talking about women’s agency, we’re talking about someone like me, who’s maybe not interested in a traditional life, which I think is something a lot of people are talking about now. There are so many entry points for people on what is it like to try to hang on to your culture. What is it like to have a difficult relationship with a parent or with a child?
Yes! I think people are interested in people. If you said to me, I want to tell a story about a woman who had seven children, became a widow young and then left her children for 18 years, that would be interesting if we were talking about a Pakistani woman or a Chinese woman or an Indian woman or a South African woman. The idea that layering on an ‘unfamiliar’ culture means that’s somehow not a fascinating story is such bullshit.
Culture makes it more interesting. What I wanted to communicate in this book is that every family has its own culture. We all have this weird culture of what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable and how we speak to each other. And it’s so interesting, because we talk about culture as this big thing that’s applied to millions of people, but that’s not how we work. And I also think people are interested in people who are different from them, quite frankly.
At the beginning of the book, I had a sense of your grandma that was pretty superficial and flat. And at the end, I had a sense of a completely different person. How did writing the book change or impact your relationship with her?
It changed my relationship with her massively. I think in a lot of ways, people were like, you must have been so close to her, you must have loved her so much. I think I loved her because she was part of my family and she was an elder and I had a certain degree of reverence for her. We had a relationship, but she was not a warm grandmother. And I don’t say that to speak poorly of her in any way. It’s more like, she was just kind of a bit of a harsh person and when you find out about her life, you realize why that happened. I also feel like I got to know her a little bit throughout her life—in her 30s, her 40s, her 50s—which is not something that you normally get to do with a grandparent.
The other thing is, in looking into my grandmother, I kind of realized that we were not similar at all, but I could still see what I’ve inherited from her. That was a super interesting perspective. You never know what’s going to happen when you start to look into your family, especially when you’re not living in the place that they were from. I think that it can give you a different sense of feeling rooted and feeling like you know your history a bit more.
In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life is out on August 13. You can pre-order it through an indie bookstore, Indigo or Amazon.
Thank you for reading this week’s Club Friday Q&A! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Subscribe to the (free) weekly newsletter, or join Club Friday, our paid membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts and Friday merch, as well as other fun perks.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and (occasionally) TikTok.