Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Beth Golay, and this is Marginalia.
Chapter 2: What is the premise of Naeem Murr's novel 'Every Exit Brings You Home'?
Author Naeem Mir's new novel, Every Exit Brings You Home, follows Jack, a complicated protagonist living with many secrets of his own creation.
Jack is an immigrant from Gaza living in Chicago with his wife, Dimra, and he works as a flight attendant, all while serving as the president of his condo association, where a family of new residents shakes up the dynamic for all of the building's residents. As Jack juggles his home life with the facade he's created for his coworkers, his past experiences in Gaza creep up in some unexpected ways.
Here's Naeem Murr, Every Exit Brings You Home. Since this book is filled with secrets, I'm going to let you decide what to reveal during this interview. So where did Jack's story begin for you? How did his story come to you?
Well, you know, I had been working on another book based upon the lives of my Palestinian uncles, my Palestinian family for many years. And I'd been doing a ton of research and I just needed a break from it. It was this enormous weight on my life. I'd never done a book that had required so much work. And so I took a walk and, you know, I was just taking a walk.
And as I approached my condominium building, outside the building were a couple who were sitting in an old Impala attached to a U-Haul trailer.
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Chapter 3: How does Jack's immigrant background shape his experiences in Chicago?
there was just something about them. They seemed incredibly sort of sad in some ways, but very connected. At the same time, they were sort of leaning against one another. And I couldn't tell if they had arrived or about to leave. And for some reason, that just set something off in me. It sort of prompted me to think about what I thought would be a short story that would end with that scene.
That scene seemed to me the end of the story. And in fact, you know, the very next day I went for a run And I could imagine that ending, and I even came up with a final line for what I thought was this story. And as soon as I started writing the story, it just came to life. And this has happened to me pretty much with every one of my novels. There's been some prompt that has set off the novel.
And it was as if this book had been gestating in me for... you know, years and years and years and years over the whole time that I had been working on this other book.
And and this single prompt had sort of, you know, brought it to the crisis of birth in some sense that, you know, it was the thing that that allowed this novel to sort of deal with all of the things I had been thinking about in a completely integrated way in a condominium building where I live in Chicago.
But, you know, going back to Gaza and to the sort of traumatic experience of the main character.
You know, the characters are so well-drawn and immediately pull you in. And I want to talk about the setting that you just mentioned. You know, we meet so many of these characters through condo politics. I mean, talk about that as a setting.
Yeah. I mean, the thing about a book like this is that you don't think about these things beforehand. You know, what happens is that these characters just sort of come to life for you and sort of start facing you across the page. But afterwards, when I look back
at the choices I made and look back at the condominium association, you can see it as a place where people in conflict have to share the same space. So it seemed like the perfect sort of microcosm. It's a little world, you know, we have someone from Haiti, we have someone from Vietnam, we have someone who's sort of a second generation Latina, and we have Jack and Dimra.
And it's sort of a little world where they have to, as I say, have to share the same place. It seemed like this perfect microcosm of, you know, to say that like the Palestinian Israeli situation, but sort of all internecine conflicts in some sense. And of course, that's not something that I thought about when I was writing it.
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Chapter 4: What inspired Naeem Murr to create the character of Jack?
units, and then there's a woman who moves into what she calls the garden apartment. And so that is another element of it, that she feels that she's treated differently from the others. And that sort of sets off, it seemed like the perfect way to initiate the story. And also that the association itself is under such pressure because it's set during the 2000, 2007, 2008 housing crisis.
And that, of course, puts everyone under pressure of potentially losing their homes. And there's another sort of resonance with the sort of Palestinian background as well. I think about 2 million people lost their homes in America during that crisis.
You know, I was trying to figure out how to ask a question and I never fully got it formed. But it felt like and maybe it's because of everything we're seeing on the news these days, whether it's what we're seeing happening in Gaza from our couches here in the United States or what we're seeing happening with immigration policy.
You were able to show a different perspective for the reader through this book, weren't you?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think I never intended this to be a partisan book in any way. You know, Jack's predicament is in some sense the predicament of every one of us. Jack's predicament is how do you move forward?
You know, how do you, you know, given like the way I think about him is that, you know, he has a past too full of love to completely cauterize and too full of pain to completely assimilate. Right. So he's sort of trapped in that way between, you know, the past, the sort of traumatic past and the future, which is true of any would be true of any many Israelis as well and many Jews as well.
It would be true of, you know, it's true of Palestinians. It's true of so many people. And it's true of all of us, even if we haven't had a traumatic past. You know, the future is always dictated in terms of how we categorize it, how we approach it emotionally by what we've experienced in the past.
So I think the way that fiction works is that you create a character who has a very specific and often very intense sort of predicament. I mean, living in Gaza was no
joke for him and he suffered both at the hands of the Israelis and at the hands of his own people as well and you know right at the core of a book you know if you go into the subtext really the predicament of the character is all of our predicament that's what we connect to you know the way in which Jack
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Chapter 5: What themes of trauma and identity are explored in the novel?
And, you know, you spend five years on a book and... to have that experience where you just don't feel that anyone in the publishing house really, as I say, has anything at stake in whether the book does anything at all.
I mean, with The Perfect Man in England, for example, I was told just before it came out, the head of Random House kind of took me to a very nice lunch and said, look, we're just going to We're going to print 2,000 copies of the hardback. That's it. No more. So essentially the same print run as you'd have for a book of poems.
And it was then sort of long listed for the book or it won one of the Commonwealth Prizes and nobody could get hold of it at all. It was just like this nightmare situation where people were writing to me saying, you know, it's like a four month wait to get hold of your book.
Chapter 6: How does the setting of a condominium influence the narrative?
And these things, you know, when I say it's no one's fault, you know, I'm not angry with anyone. It's not like I have any bitterness or anger. It's it's the it's the business. It's such a difficult business, this business. Nobody really knows what books are going to do well or succeed. So it's a really hard business. And so many writers could tell you exactly the same stories.
I'm not even remotely alone. Yeah.
I was very careful about avoiding spoilers. I feel like I haven't really asked anything about the book. But is there anything that you would like to talk about that I haven't asked? Or do you have a hope for what readers take away from the book?
You know, I do think for me, almost all fiction for me is about two things. It's about intimacy and it's about truth. That's what all of my books are focused on, on relationships as they develop. It's all about trying to connect to other people all the way through and that some truth slowly, slowly, slowly surfacing through the material of the book.
I think for me a book is a kind of relationship. You know, one of the things that I noticed when I would go to sort of reading groups is that, you know, why they connect to some books and don't connect to others is because some books really offer a kind of relationship, right? You enter all of those lives. I think that, you know, this book has a lot of sort of fundamental sort of mythic themes.
I think one of the elements that's there all the way throughout is corrupted Edens. There are all these lovers, you know, so Georges and his lover Farida.
and jack and his cousin and then there's another relationship as well where you have these couples who are it's a sort of strange edenic world like for example with jack and his cousin they meet in a half-destroyed house you know in this white room that looks out upon the sea this is in gaza and all around them there is chaos and there is horror right and with another couple this
Lebanese man, George, and his lover, Farida. She is Palestinian. He is a Maronite. They should not be together. And they, too, become lovers during the context of the Lebanese Civil War. Again, you have this image of lovers of a kind of Edenic, an Adam and Eve at the center. Here they are. They're completely connected at the center of all of this incredible disconnection of horror, of war.
And I think those themes of the Paradise is always with us, right? Paradise is always with us. There's a moment where Jack is in Gaza And he feels that paradise beneath the surface. He can smell the honeysuckle. He can look out at the sea at this beautiful view.
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Chapter 7: How does the book reflect on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
I think the reason that libraries have always been kind of taboo for some people and have had some restrictions and made people a little bit disgruntled is because of that quiet aspect that the library, yes, it is a quiet place. We do use our library voices. It is a place where you can go to study. You can go to have meetings. And I love that.
I love that I witnessed several occasions where social workers would bring in kids who are trying to be reunited with their guardians. And the library is that safe place, that place where they can kind of have some privacy and peace to go about that.
But I think in making it this ultra quiet place where the librarian was this feared person who was waiting to shush you around the corner at any time is why libraries weren't the most favorite place in the world for a long time.
And in doing that, it excluded near-divergent folks, people who may not be able to control stimming or various outbursts of joyful noise or just noise about what's going on in the world. And I think that's great that now there's probably some bothersome people like me who are saying, yeah, you come into the library, you can make noise.
We're going to talk to you at some point if you're on your speakerphone, if your library kids are running around too much. The library is, I believe, a cooler place than Disneyland, so I get it. But There indeed are these different people. I think that's why I'm always talking about, yes, the library is not this place where you have to be ultra quiet. We're going to teach you.
We're going to encourage you. We're going to take it experience by experience. But I personally, especially being a children's librarian, you just hear this cheerfulness. You hear them just looking for new books, learning what's at the library. Like it's always just this excited noise. So I think it's just for a library to be like, you know, it's not a library if it's not quiet.
If I can't hear everything, that's not a library. I get it. That's the way we grew up. That's the way I grew up. But we're doing something different now. We have noisy library days, but we also have pockets of the library. A lot of libraries have meeting rooms. There's a time that library people know if you come during this block of time, it tends to be a bit quieter.
And we're just trying to work with everybody. But in working with everybody, it's not that The quietness of the library takes precedence. It's that the belonging of the library always takes precedence. That's always a priority is trying to make everybody feel as safe as possible and that they belong. By saying the library is the house of books, the house of community, the house of good things.
And sometimes that includes quiet moments, library voices, and people are like, okay, cool. I can go to this place. I can try to be myself. And if maybe I don't realize how loud I'm being, the library person is going to be polite. They're going to come up to me and we're going to have a conversation and we're going to figure out how to make it the best library day for everybody involved.
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