Marilyn Abildskov

Interviewed By Jennie Durant

Marilyn Abildskov earned her MFA from the University of Iowa. She has published literary essays, short stories, and poems in such journals as Sonora Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Puerto del Sol.  A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and other honors, Abildskov lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College.  The Sightline Books Series of The University of Iowa Press published her intimate travel memoir, The Men in My Country, in the fall of 2004.  Like the finest travel narratives, The Men in My Country, details the transformative effects travel has on the human heart.  At the age of 30, Abildskov left America to teach English at junior high schools in Japan.  She fell in love with the country and with three men in particular.  Of The Men in My Country, Terry Tempest Williams says, “Japan becomes a rich landscape of love and we accept this exquisite book as the gift of experience.  When T.S. Eliot speaks of transient beauty born out of sorrow, he was foreshadowing the writing of Marilyn Abildskov.”

JD: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

MA: I wrote all the time as a child and beyond and all along the way I met people who told me I should take writing seriously.  But I didn’t.  Because I didn’t take myself seriously.  Because I guess I didn’t think I was smart enough. Or something enough.  Anyway, I was 30 when I went to Japan and I fell in love and then everything just kind of fell apart, and then when I came back to the States, I was leveled.  And it just didn’t matter to me anymore, these distinctions of “smart” or “not smart enough.” And so, when I started graduate school, I started writing and I didn’t stop.  I’d been writing all along but now I wrote with abandon and I never looked back.  In a way, I think Japan made a writer out of me.

JD: Weren’t you a journalist before going to Japan?

MA: Yes, in my twenties I worked at a newspaper just outside of my hometown of Salt Lake City for five years. Four of those years were great.  And working as a journalist seemed to satisfy the urge to write. I loved it. I never had the ambition then to write the Great American Novel.  I never even had the ambition to write the Small Swedish Novella.  I was just a small-town feature writer and I didn’t care about all the things that most ambitious journalists do—getting your work onto A-1 or moving up the ladder or moving on to a hotshot paper. I was a feature writer, not a news reporter, so I did a lot of soft news:  stories about how to pick out a cantaloupe or get your kids to read. They were what most people would call trivial stories, but I was very interested in all that trivia. And even now I have a real allegiance to the most of ordinary stories, very quiet stories.  It’s part of why I love the personal essay, the “genre of littleness” as Phillip Lopate calls it.  And I tried to write my own book—which is really a long personal essay, in many ways—with that in mind:  as a story about the most ordinary of things, like falling in love with a place and a man and then having to leave both behind.

JD: So you applied to Iowa while you were in Japan?

MA: Yes, I had met Jo Ann Beard at a writing conference (Writers@Work in Park City, Utah) the year before and she told me about the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa.  I knew about Iowa long before that, of course, but only the famous Writers’ Workshop in fiction and poetry.  Most of my favorite writers had gone to the Workshop or taught at the Workshop and so the place, Iowa, had this mystique, this sheen, this intimidating glow. It’s like Emerald City for writers, isn’t it? Well, people like me, we don’t just go to Emerald City.  We’re the ones who stay back in Kansas, cleaning house, working the fields.  So anyway, meeting Jo Ann, who was working on the essays that would become The Boys of My Youth—was important to me.  I don’t know that I would have had learned about the Nonfiction Writing program otherwise. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have had the gumption—or confidence or whatever you want to call it—to apply to Iowa otherwise, without a friend coaxing me along, saying, do it, do it. And Jo Ann’s work was so inspiring—just so original and musical and good—that I felt like, I’ll do anything to be near that, to learn from people whose writing, I knew, was beyond what I was capable of doing.

JD: How did going to Iowa shape your writing?

MA:  It was wonderful. It opened me up.  I got an excellent education, courses from academics as well as practicing writers. And it was good to be in the less-famous program because there was no pressure or it felt as if there was no pressure, anyway.  You could just try things out and experiment and sort of watch the contours of your voice begin to take shape. And those first few months were charmed.  Because I was just back from Japan—just back from speaking very poor Japanese and very little English— I experienced almost no writer’s block at all.  I was just so happy to be back in the swim of things, back in that ocean of English.  The words flowed out of me that first semester, so much so that I didn’t realize it wasn’t going that way for everyone else.  At one point, my best friend, Ellen, who was also doing her MFA at Iowa at the same time and who is a very smart, very shrewd, said, “You have to stop asking people how their writing is going, because their writing isn’t going well and your writing is going just fine and you don’t seem to understand that it doesn’t work this way for everyone.” 

It’s true; I didn’t.

JD: So your first year in graduate school was an extremely productive phase?

MA: Well, it felt productive!  I probably threw most of those pages away, but yes, it felt productive, it felt good, it felt natural to be writing fulltime like that. I didn’t think about whether the writing was any good or not and I didn’t think about how my writing would be received. Some workshops went well; some didn’t.  Some people liked what I was doing; some people didn’t.  But I was sinking into the writing life and loving that.  Which isn’t a bad way to write, when you think of it— keeping criticism at bay for a while; luxuriating in the privacy of figuring out a particular piece.  I was 33 when I started graduate school and I’d waited a long time for that.  And I was writing out of a sense of nostalgia if you can call it that. The minute I left Japan, I wanted to go back. Writing was a way to remain in this place that I missed. So maybe that’s why there weren’t any judgments. Writing served this larger purpose of allowing me to keep traveling in a country—and in a relationship with this man— I never wanted to end.

JD: How did you go about putting your book together? It’s non-linear, there aren’t any chapters, and it’s woven in this very lyrical way. Was the formation of the book a puzzle for you?

MA: That outburst of raw emotion that sustained me in graduate school—that was of little use later on when I was trying to put my book together.  I started out writing another book entirely, one that was made up of linked personal essays about my time in Japan and that, taken together, cast a wide cultural net.  One essay was about a visit to the sento and the whole notion of sensuality in the everyday life in Japan; another was about a visit two boy students made to my apartment to fix my shoji doors and an afternoon of repairs. These essays were good for me at the time because I could only get my arms around a single narrative whereas the complications of a book seemed far beyond what I thought I could do. But one of those essays was longer than the others—more like a novella than a stand-alone essay—and it was more interior, more raw, more personal.  It was called “The Men in My Country” and for the longest time I thought it threw the other essays out of whack.  But because my agent and others didn’t think so, I ignored that. 

And then, in a roundabout way I met Carol Houck Smith, an editor at W.W. Norton, who has worked with a long list of amazing writers, people like Rita Dove and Stephen Dunn and Rick Bass and Pam Houston and Charles Baxter, and Carol was kind enough to read my manuscript, messy as it was at the time, and she said, “Your story starts here,” and she pointed to the essay titled “The Men in My Country,” and in doing so, she articulated what I’d been thinking for a long time by then:  that I should write that story out, give that story its due; that my book should be about those men and that crazy-chaotic time when everything, I mean everything—where you live, what you do, and who you love—it’s all up for grabs.  And I came to understand that what I really wanted to say about travel had to do with the restlessness of relationships, how there are these entanglements that you find yourself in that can terrify you.  And the notion of etiquette between men and women became important to me, too.  It doesn’t factor into our daily life in the United States the way that it does in Japan. The notion of etiquette is so laced throughout that culture, and as a visitor you’re understandably aware of how often you’re messing things up. I messed up big-time in those relationships and that, I decided, was the real story.

So I started all over.  That’s when I began. 

JD: And the way it’s structured?  Can you talk about that?

MA:  Well, it’s funny that you say it’s non-linear because I’ve always thought it was most sturdily linear story I’ve ever written!  I move from meeting one man to the next, for instance, and there’s this forward thrust of time as I’m tracking through my last six months in Japan.  But I know what you mean. There are digressions.  Not so much flashbacks, though there are few of those, but little asides, little vignettes.  I loved writing those. I loved weaving those in.  It was fascinating to try to puzzle out what should go where, and of course there wasn’t anyone to tell me what the right answer was. I just kept giving it to my writer-friends, the people who are the most generous and critical readers I know, and kept at it, trying to find the music.  I think I wanted the book to sound like certain songs I’ve loved.  Like that Nanci Griffith version of the Bob Dylan song, “Boots of Spanish Leather.”  Very even.  Almost laconic.  But bursting with sadness at the end. 

One thing I did very consciously—and maybe this is embarrassingly obvious—was to move through each of the three men, who are the central characters beside me, one by one and to give them each their own separate chapters initially.  But when the crack-up begins, I started consciously allowing the men to mingle on the page—you know, to allow for a bit of the professor to sit side by side a short scene with Amir.  And I hoped this would indicate the ways in which the narrator went from thinking that she could keep the men separate in these neat little categories of body, mind, and soul, to showing how they refused to stay put. There’s a line in the book where one of the junior high boys says, “pretty isn’t a 1-2-3 kind of thing” and I think it’s an important line, a key line.  For me, any way, part of the argument the book attempts to make implicitly is that love and affection is not a 1-2-3 kind of thing, that these hierarchies don’t pan out, that each person invents the concept for us all over again.  So the digressions and vignettes were important not only for adding texture to the book but for what I had in mind conceptually.  And you start seeing them more of them as the book goes on.

JD: Why didn’t you put any chapters in your book?

MA:  I wanted it clean.  Spare. Without static or clutter. I wanted it to be one of those books you could read in a single setting and chapter titles seemed distracting.  I used numbered titles at one point but, I don’t know—this is embarrassing— I got all tripped up by the final number.  I didn’t like the number. Whatever the number was, I decided I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the whole idea of numbers, in fact—not in general, but just for this book. So at the last minute I stripped the book of its numbers and stripped it of its chapter headings and I went with a lot of white space.  I love white space. And I think white space is key to that experience of living as an American in Japan.  There’s all this noise around you of ordinary life, all the buildings and the neon and the buzz that is a Japanese city, but you’re immune when you don’t speak the language, you’re cut off.  I liked that experience of being cut off.  It’s like living in white space, in the margins.  There’s something restful about it. And given that so much of my book is about restlessness—that’s really, what the men are about—every bit of white space seems even more important.

JD: It’s interesting how place shapes your book. Even the way you describe it is very “Zen.”

MA: I know! I did feel that there was something Japanese in making the book more spare, maybe more elegant. And I was vigilant about cutting, not adding at one point.  Though of course, it’s about me and I’m an American and that means the book is also large and unruly and loud and very un-Japanese, too. I felt there were two aesthetics at work, two distinct cultural sensibilities, and I could point out to you specific chapters and specific sentences that reflect those two different urges, one to move outward—to sprawl—the other to fold inward—to compress. I even had these two images in mind at different times:  those sculptures by Rodin of wide women, sprawling, and the tiniest of origami cranes, neatly folded up.

JD: There’s the question of authenticity in memoir, because memory itself is so subjective. How do you approach authenticity in memoir?

MA:  I’m glad you use that word, “authenticity.”  The word authenticity makes more sense to me than truth. I get frustrated with the whole debate about accuracy and whether or not the memoirist can make something up because I don’t think it’s the right question or the most interesting question or the most useful question. When you write, you’re making something up. It’s that simple.  You’re putting words onto the page; creating something you hope seems whole.  You’re using your imagination.  Even if you’re writing from memory—maybe especially—you’re using your imagination. You’re trying to create this thing that’s alive. And you’re doing what a novelist does only instead of asking that age-old question that prompts fiction—What if? —you’re turning to your past, asking:  “What was that?  Who were those people?”  So maybe literary memoirs should be called memory-novels. I’ve wondered that for some time.

That’s not to say I didn’t turn to the notebooks that I’d kept when I lived in Japan.  I did. And I was grateful for them. And surprised by how much good stuff was in there—little details that I’d forgotten about after I’d been living in the States again for several years:  that the telephone booths in Japan are green and pink, for instance. I didn’t turn to the notebooks so much for dialogue.  Mostly I tried to remember styles of speech.  And then, of course, there are things that you just don’t forget.  I don’t know if I ever wrote down what Nozaki said to me that one night when I asked him what he wanted from me but I’m pretty sure I remember it accurately, that he said, “Everything and nothing,” and that he called ours a “layered relationship.” There are things that you just don’t forget.  These things are imprinted onto you.  And the job writing-wise becomes making meaning out of that that someone else will understand. That’s why I don’t think the issue of accuracy is as important as authenticity. And I don’t know how else to say it except that there is something incredibly authentic about the personal essays and memoirs that have meant the most to me, some trueness of voice that’s very moving to me.

JD: So how did you get authenticity in your book?

MA:  I don’t know if authenticity is something you get into a book as much as something that you either have in your writing voice or you don’t.  Which is not to discount craft.  It’s just to say that authenticity goes well beyond craft.

JD: As a student of nonfiction, I think many of us get caught up in trying to be factually true, which can stop us from telling the story well. But it’s the emotional authenticity that is most important.

MA: But it’s not as if you know from the start what that means—how to tell the story well. Or I didn’t. I remember a friend reading the manuscript in an early form and saying there was way too much logistical information about getting from A to B. Which I think comes from a desire to be accurate. And then what I had to do was shed that desire and go deeper, find a more purposeful interiority, the voice of vulnerability, and rely on that, hope that the emotional truth could rise from that. But you’re figuring all that out along the way. You, too, as a writer, have to go from A to B, boring as that may sound, and make all these mistakes, the ones everyone makes, in order to figure out the more important stuff.

And it’s true that a desire to be factually correct can us back but it can also work to our advantage. I remember once writing an essay about that visit those two Japanese boys made to my apartment to help me repair these shoji doors—there’s a page from that essay in The Men in My Country now—and after I had written several drafts, I found in one of my notebooks that I had gotten one of the details wrong, that one of the boy’s favorite team was not the Bulls, it was some other team, I’ve forgotten now which one. So I changed it. That detail actually mattered to me, maybe out of some sense of honoring this boy. And even though he’ll never read that essay—or my book—and even though that detail probably wouldn’t matter to anyone else, well—what can I say?  He was this real person in my life.  I wanted to get that one little thing right.  I think we want to get the details right for a reason. But what that word “right” means is incredibly complicated.

JD: Yes, it seems the poetics, aliveness, and integrity of the scene is most important.

MA: And there’s something to be said for the imagination of the memory. We all embroider, and isn’t that a wonderful thing? The minute we tell a story, we’re going to add some details, because that’s the nature of storytelling:  it’s the nature of reinventing.

JD: Your book speaks to a somewhat common universality: the foreign romance and romance in general.

MA:  And romance, I know, is often perceived as one of those trivial subjects. But I think love—and I use that term very broadly to include gardens, dogs, eccentricities, and ideas—for me, it’s the most transformative subject.  The only subject.  I can’t imagine, really, writing about anything else. And I don’t mean love as some soft-focus thing. I think there can and should be great clarity and rage and insight and power when writers take on love.  All the great writers do it.  You can’t read James Baldwin’s essays, for instance, without being fully aware of how much he loves America. It’s love that’s the source for a good deal of rage.

JD: What’s your motivation to continue writing?

MA:  It’s a cliché but a true one that writing itself is its own reward. It’s not about anything else. It’s not about publication or validation or anything except the writing itself.  If you love to write, you just love everything that comes along with that, even the trouble, and there is a lot of trouble. I’m not happy all the time in my writing life. I despair. But I know now that that’s part of the process. You don’t have to fake it and you don’t have to put on a brave face, but you also can’t let that get the best of you. You can’t use that as an excuse not to write because if that’s what you are, that’s what you are.  I tell young writers this all the time.  Just face the fact that you’re a writer and get on with it. It’s a lot more trouble to be a writer who doesn’t write than to be one who does, so just get on with it. And take comfort in what the books say, too, how the books will teach you to just carry on. I think the best commentary on art is art itself.  I’m thinking of that passage in Baldwin’s story, “Sonny’s Blues,” which I’ve always thought of as a response to the question what motivates us to write and is, certainly, the mantra that is behind every creative writing class I teach:  “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.  There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”  Isn’t that beautiful? 

JD: It’s like a marriage. It’s never going to be perfect.

MA: Right. And I still feel that the worst writing day is the best day, that any degree of immersion you’re able to find is so exhilarating. One of the things that I miss about working on a book-length project is that full immersion. You’re out in the ocean, without a life jacket, and there’s something sort of amazing about it. I mean, you’re about to drown but the sky is so gorgeous out there.

JD: What are you currently working on?

MA: I’m working on a couple of things. One’s very new, very fragile. Talking about it is like listening to someone describe a sonogram:  there are some arms, maybe, some legs.  But does it have a beating heart? I don’t know yet.  It isn’t shapely enough to talk about in any meaningful way.  I’m trying to just feel my way through it in whatever time that I have. But I’m also working on separate pieces that aren’t part of any larger project—you know, old essays, starts from stories that have been sitting around for a while. Everything, short or long, seems to take five years.  My big thing is that I try to do something every day.  Teaching is demanding enough right now that I don’t make it.  In fact, lately I don’t even come close. But I’m happiest when I’m writing a little bit every day.  And I’ve learned that I’m not happy when I’m writing, necessarily, but I’m a lot less unhappy. That’s for sure.  When I don’t write, I get crazy; I want to throw myself off a bridge.  As you know, there are a lot of bridges around here.  We’re not in Iowa anymore.

JD: How do you think teaching enhances your writing?

MA: I try to look at teaching and writing as complementary to one another, as feeding each other in important ways.  It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking teaching steals time and energy from your writing life but of course for all that it may steal, it also adds something potent too.  But in many respects, the two have nothing to do with each other.  One is solitary while the other is social; one is about generosity while the other is about selfishly preserving your time.  I love teaching and I’m beholden to the ways it has, as a profession, opened me up.  And I adore my students, all of them, the 18-year olds who hate writing and just want to pass composition class and the graduate students who are well on their way to writing books, who are more like peers than students in a way.  I am, every semester, seduced by the force of all those personalities.  But I don’t have any illusions that a good teaching day translates into good writing.  You go home.  You collapse onto the red couch.  And now you are on your own with your writing. You have that blank page just like your students have when they sit down to write. 

JD: Has the writing process become easier for you?

MA: No. 

JD: How has reading influenced your writing life?

MA:  Well, you write because you read and you read because you want to write and the two are so tightly intertwined it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.  My own sense is that writers so love reading that they would like to eat the books and in lieu of that, we write new ones instead.  Or, put another way, we believe on some level that books saved us and we’re devoted, afterward, to try to do some saving back.  It’s this beautiful form of pay back.  And of course there’s a reason why all the great writers tell those of us who are just starting out, “Read, read, read.” That immersion into the language of the great writers imprints you with a sense of musicality. And it can make you braver about taking on the big ideas.  Of course it can also work in another way:  It can also be a painful reminder of what you’ll never be able to try, let alone execute.  I read a lot of writers who have a wonderful sense of plot and I love reading them and, at the same time, I mourn the fact that I have such a diminished sense of plot. I don’t even think in terms of plot.  I think in terms of voice.  So stories never come to me. Sentences come to me—what seem in my head to be these perfect sentences—but never stories with interesting plots. So what I’m saying is that reading reminds you how small you are as a writer and even that is a wonderful thing because let’s face it, the reality of reading great works of literature is that it’s humbling. Which is why it’s so funny that some of us still plunge ahead and write.  I mean, it’s lunacy, isn’t it!  It isn’t as if the world needs more books or that the great books haven’t been written!  But some of us have that urge—and you either have it or you don’t--to get in on the act.  And isn’t that just the most ridiculous and beautiful thing?  It’s Jean Rhys, I think, who talks about all of writing as this huge lake and how there are the great rivers, people like Tolstoy, and then the mere trickles and she counts herself in that category of trickles and then she says, “All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter.  The lake matters.”

JD: There’s also much to be said for the craft of writing, too, the technical details that bring a story to life.

MA: Right, and the craft is endlessly interesting to those of us who have devoted ourselves to the writing life. I heard Francine Prose say that all writers were like mechanics:  we just like lifting the hoods to stories to ask ourselves, how does it work?  I could point to specific places in my book and tell you what I was reading at the time, what technique I was trying to figure out.  And I remember very distinctly a certain phase of writing when I understood that if there was anything to be learned, it was that you need to step away from the scene and let the moment do whatever work it can and should. That was part of the craft, too—stripping away of a lot of static and noise. I don’t know if it worked or not. I just know that it seemed clear to me that I needed to consciously avoid trying spin a little web of beautiful language around a moment and instead to just step away and let each moment accumulate to be something larger than it was on its own. I had Japanese flower design in mind:  the incredible beauty and simplicity of ikebana where it’s about—as I understand it—placement and order, not the abundance of the flowers themselves.

JD: And it’s almost as if different stories call for different identities, different voices. 

MA: That’s such an interesting subject: the idea that subject dictates style and especially place. I can tell that there was a sparseness to the Japanese-centered scenes that simply wasn’t there when I got to scenes in Iowa. And there was simplicity of language. And it’s because I wasn’t speaking Japanese fluently, but I was using very simple English by teaching English as a second language. And so all of that saturates the writing.

JD: How would you say that writing has affected the way you observe the world?

MA: At its best it makes you more attentive to the world, to the everyday details of the world. I taught a class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival recently on the notebook, and I used this line by Thomas Mallon from his book about diarists called A Book of One’s Own:  “I’ve learned,” Mallon said, “that nothing never happens.”  I love that, the idea that every day is so full that nothing never happens, that there’s always something.  But by the same token, I also know that writing demands that you close yourself off to the world.  Otherwise, you can’t get the work done.  There are a ton of things that I did in my twenties that I don’t do now and there’s a certain level of sociability that I had that I suspect I won’t ever have again. I write and I teach and that’s plenty. And it’s been this way for years.  When I lived in Iowa City, there was this guy—a writer—who I’d see working in his apartment every night and his apartment had this big window that overlooked the street.  And I used to walk by and think, oh good, the Fishbowl Writer’s still hard at work.  And I took such comfort in that because I too was heading home to work.  And so, there’s that: the way we’re also very much in this together, as writers, very much living in a little fishbowl of an apartment, so to speak, even though we’re also working very much on our own.  But there are probably people who look at the this kind of existence—you know, staying home on sunny days, holed up for hours, just thinking— and feel very sorry for us! I know it sounds a little dull.  But for me it’s very full because I like being home alone, I like imagining and remembering and I don’t know—I went to a lot of parties in my twenties. None of them were all that great. So for me, the writing life is ideal.  It’s kind of like being a new parent. It consumes you and you lose sleep and yes, you make all kinds of sacrifices and for what?  Who knows whether it will work out or not?  But you’re very happy to be home in sweatpants with the baby.  In fact, there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.

JD: Have you kept in touch with any of the men in The Men In My Country?

MA: I was in touch with Amir for about a year after I left Japan. We called each other from time to time.  And it was just as it was there:  wonderful, untroubled, very funny, and very sweet. And I was in touch with the professor through letters for a year or two as well, and that was just as it had been:  troubled, fraught, lots of misunderstandings. I wish I had gone about that relationship differently.  I would have loved to have been friends with him.

Anyway, I didn’t contact the men when I started working on this book. I changed their names and identifying details. And for a long time I didn’t even allow myself to think about what their reactions might be. Even if the work is flattering, I know that it’s still incredibly unnerving to be the subject of someone else’s writing. I have a lot of writer friends and a few of the poets have used me in their work and I’m always surprised afterward at how exposed I feel.  And I’m really private in some ways, so why would I want to turn around and write about the private lives of other people, not to mention myself? I can’t answer that except to say, maybe that’s exactly why.  Maybe the book—be it a memoir or another kind of book—is a place of exposure where you can command attention and somehow get the story right.  Not right as in you have it turn out a certain way, but right as in you tell it in the way that you’ve been wanting to for some time with the kind of purposeful interiority that reflects the intimacy of the story.

JD: What do you think their responses would be to the book?

MA: That’s a great question, and I don’t know.  Maybe I haven’t allowed myself to think too much about this.  The thought of hurting any one of them with what’s in this book—well, that’s just so troubling to me.  But the truth is also that I had to write this book.  And it was a labor of love.  So I console myself with the idea that a very small book published in the United States will probably never be on the radar for the men who are, I imagine, still in Japan or Iran.  Still, it’s a great question: what would they think?

The professor is the only one who speaks English fluently. And my guess is that if he read the book, he’d tell you that his version is very different. And rightly so. I suspect he would be hurt by some portions of the book and maybe surprised.  I was surprised, too, in the writing as I interrogated my own motivations. And I can’t say I was all that pleased to unearth some of what I did. But I also think he’d be really happy that I found my writing passion. He predicted that long before I did. I think Amir would say, “That’s about right!” And he’d probably be flattered.  And I have absolutely no idea what Nozaki would say. None. So the mystery remains.