Best-selling authors share vivid memories at roundtable talk for Class of 2010
The event “Three Books” featured a discussion with authors Khaled Hosseini, Tracy Kidder and Julie Orringer.
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
To hear it directly from the authors of these books: Researching and writing Mountains Beyond Mountains permanently jolted Tracy Kidder's peace of mind. How to Breathe Underwater was Julie Orringer's ode to the adolescent misfit she once was. The Kite Runner, meanwhile, was Khaled Hosseini's attempt to convey the horrors and hopes of a country he fled long ago.
Such were the confessions of the three writers at a roundtable discussion held in Memorial Auditorium on Sept. 20. The evening event, titled "Three Books," has been part of New Student Orientation since 2004 and was hosted by Julie Lythcott-Haims, dean of freshmen and transfer students. Her office purchased the books and sent copies of each to every incoming undergraduate to read over the summer.
English Professor Tobias Wolff, an acclaimed author of many short stories and the memoir This Boy's Life, moderated the discussion and asked the writers why they chose the profession and what inspired them to write their books. The authors began quizzing each other halfway through, and toward the end, students were given a chance to ask their own questions and share their thoughts. Some gushed with compliments, while others sought answers to questions that genuinely vexed them.
For instance, one student asked how Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of Mountains Beyond Mountains, could be so tirelessly devoted to the community-based clinics he founded in Haiti and his larger crusade against the social inequality endemic in health care. Kidder has described Farmer as someone who works nonstop, hardly sleeps and sees his wife and child "for a day or so every few months."
In response to the student's question, Kidder projected several photographs onto a giant screen over the stage. He acknowledged the irony of a writer communicating through pictures rather than words, but the visuals said it all—before and after shots of Haitians, first horrifically emaciated and inches from death; then the same patients, following treatment, having gained substantial weight and smiling calmly.
"I think the rewards for this kind of work for a doctor are pretty obvious," Kidder said. "This organization and Farmer himself have thousands and thousands and thousands of before-and-after photos like these, to their credit."
But when Kidder first learned about the story of the uncommon physician while reporting on American soldiers in Haiti for the New Yorker, he was profoundly impressed and yet did not pounce. "I didn't pursue him for six years, and that was very unusual for me," Kidder said. "If I started following him around, he would disturb my peace of mind."
Hosseini is a doctor, but he said he has written stories since he was a child growing up in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. He told the audience he was fairly insulated from the type of extreme poverty and violence he portrayed in The Kite Runner, and that his family fled the country just like the book's main character, Amir. Hosseini also recalled how he would sit with one of his household servants and teach him English, echoing the bond Amir had with his Hazara servant, Hassan.
But one day in the late nineties Hosseini saw something on television: Members of the Taliban interrupting the funeral procession of an Afghani man and flogging his feet because his beard was too short by their standards. Hosseini was further enraged by reports that the Taliban outlawed kite flying, which he said was a rite of passage for all Afghani children when he was growing up.
"When I heard this story, it seemed hardly possible that this was the same country where I was raised," said Hosseini, adding that the ban on kite flying "struck me as uniquely cruel, given that so many kids in Afghanistan are very poor and they really have no access to any kind of entertainment—and now that was also taken from them."
Hosseini's first stab at telling the full story was through a 25-page piece he pitched to the New Yorker. The magazine passed, and it wasn't until after he returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to see the atrocities firsthand that he fleshed out the story into a full-length novel. "But I found that, ultimately, people have an amazing capacity for hope," Hosseini said. "I think a lot of it also affected my writing."
At one point, Kidder turned to Orringer and asked if she drew on her own adolescent experiences in order to portray the intense cruelty inflicted upon the main character in "Note to Sixth-Grade Self," one of the nine short stories in How to Breathe Underwater. Classmates constantly tease the girl in that story, dupe her into showing up alone at a shopping mall and then take the new dress she buys and rip it to pieces.
Her only solace is that she shines in dance class and has the silent sympathy of a boy who both she and a tormenter find cute. Orringer said she took ballroom dancing in the sixth grade and described herself as a nerd who didn't dress well and suffered from a condition that required her to wear an eye patch. But as awkward as she felt, one classmate danced with her anyway—and she never forgot that.
"I had this hope that some kid out there might pick up this book and feel understood in some way," Orringer said. "That was the most pleasurable experience I had when I was reading as a kid, that somebody had this secret window into my life."
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