Malaka Gharib is a writer and artist and the author of the graphic memoir I Was Their American Dream. She is also a journalist at NPR in Washington, and reports about global health and development. In her free time, she loves making mini zines, doodling, and leaving nice messages for people on the bus. See her work on her Instagram.

You can read an excerpt of I Was Their American Dream on The Nib.

EB: Since this is an interview series about nonfiction, let’s start with how you began writing nonfiction. What drew you to the genre?

MG: My grandfather was a journalist and he always told me to write what I know. As a kid, I took that literally. Writing what I knew meant, to me, writing about my own life and in my journal, which is how I got my start as a young writer. I would also illustrate my journal in the style of Amelia’s Notebook by Marissa Moss.

EB: Ahh! I loved that book!

MG: I just had the chance to meet Marissa Moss. I copped so much of her style and that book was so influential that when I met her I cried. I was so happy to meet her and say thank you. There’s a photo of us on my Instagram.

EB: I haven’t thought about it in years but I was so obsessed with it. I should reread it.

MG: It’s really wonderful.

EB: Okay, but back to nonfiction.

MG: So often real life is even stranger than fiction. It can be even more shocking than fiction because it’s real. I think that an upbringing like mine—growing up in an Asian bubble in Southern California and spending my summers in Egypt—while that was completely normal for a lot of kids in my town, immigrant kids who spent the summers going on holiday to their family’s villages or hometowns abroad, it seemed like a very exotic upbringing for many Americans who may not be as familiar with those stories.

In 2016, there was a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric. I realized that people didn’t know that side of America existed.

EB: That brings me to what I wanted to ask next—how did your book come about? Had you always wanted to write a book? A memoir specifically? Or did the idea come to you after 2016?

MG: I had never thought about writing a book. I had been part of zine and comics community in Washington, DC, and we have this ethos about self-publishing stuff quick, dirty, fast. When I was in my twenties I had a food magazine called The Runcible Spoon. It was a zine, but at one point we were featured in The New York Timesand someone approached me about doing a cookbook. It just didn’t feel like it was the right project for me. It felt like a shame—I was 25, 26 at the time—to say no to a book project, but it didn’t feel like what I wanted to spend two or three years working on. But when this came along, it felt like it was the absolutely right thing to do. I felt that I had to write this book.

Everybody in 2016 was finding ways to support the community—people joined the ACLU, people gave to Planned Parenthood—but I wanted to do something that I felt really gave my talents back. What I wanted to do was correct the negative narrative about immigrants and I thought that sharing my story was the best, most helpful thing I could do.

EB: What about the choice to format your book as a graphic memoir as opposed to writing a straight-prose memoir? Was that a no-brainer because of your history with comics and zines, or did you go back and forth on what way to present your story?

MG: There is something about the graphic memoir format that is so engaging. I wanted people to enter my world. I wanted to be able to express emotions that are hard to get across in just text—I wanted you to feel my frenetic energy and passion about my culture and about the emotions and discoveries I was going through. I wanted you to see the look in my eyes or see my hair react when I learned something shocking. I wanted you to feel my love of my dad and my mom. And I really think the comics format is so beautiful—words and images in conversation with each other… it’s really poetry.

EB: When did you first start drawing comics?

MG: I was home recently in California and I found some of my first panel drawings which were as early as middle school. So I felt really comfortable using this format. I actually hadn’t read many graphic novels or comic artists until later in life, but everyone has a medium they’re into—poets love the restriction of poetry, essayists love the essay. Comics and the graphic novel format felt very natural to me.

EB: You mentioned wanting to get across the love you have for your family in your book—which you clearly did, I really felt it—but I wanted to ask: how do you approach writing about people you care about? It’s one of the things I find most challenging about writing personal nonfiction. What is your strategy?

MG: I had two mantras while I was writing the book. The first came after I simply Googled “how to write a memoir.” I don’t remember now where I found it, but I read that memoir isn’t about revealing your deepest darkest secrets, but it is about unveiling a truth and using anecdotes to get at that truth. I don’t have to tell you a dark secret if it doesn’t serve the plot. That made it really helpful for me to choose what to include.

And I could also negotiate. For example, my editor, Ben de la Cruz, another Filipino-American, told me that my relationship with [my husband] Darren came across as too perfect, and that I had to share more tension. So, I told Darren that, and we talked about what anecdotes would make sense to include—things that wouldn’t make him look bad, but that would get the point across. What we settled on was—and these are true to life—the difficulties of how much money to give to family members, and how long family members should get to stay at our house. But we mutually agreed together to include those.

The other came from my training as a journalist. You never want your subjects to be surprised when they read the final product. It is your responsibility as a journalist to hint along the way what your story is going to be about. If it’s going to be critical, they should get a heads up.

I asked my parents a lot of questions like: Why did you get divorced? Give me three reasons. Or, Mom said this—do you agree or disagree? And then I would go to my aunt and ask: My parents said this is why they divorced—do you agree or disagree? Why do you think they split up? Because the book is fact-based, everything is fact-checked. Even the slang I used in high school—I called up an old friend and asked Did we really use the word “greenhorn”? Seems kind of weird, but we did have a lot of Portuguese kids in our school… And she said that she absolutely remembered that.

I did miss one thing though—after reading the book, my mom told me she didn’t take money for my college tuition out of her mortgage, but out of her house, which is apparently different. I didn’t know that about home financing.

EB: Of course. It’s always the one little thing that is wrong.

MG: Right.

EB: Actually, I would love to know—compared to your journalism work, how was the experience of writing a memoir different? Clearly you applied a lot of your journalist techniques to your research and how you handled your subjects, but how else was your writing process the same or different?

MG: It was similar in a lot of ways. Except, instead of going to experts and researchers to validate my article by providing facts and evidence, I relied on my own introspection and life experience. If I wanted to make the point that “I had a nice summer with my dad,” I had to find supporting anecdotes in my own life to illustrate that. And just like an article, I had to have a captivating lede—a beginning—that draws people in. I had to make satisfying and compelling points. And of course, I had to have a kicker—an ending—that landed.

EB: What was the most challenging part about writing I Was Their American Dream?

MG: When you’re writing about yourself, you better be prepared to grapple with the truths you uncover about yourself. I struggled through the writing process with learning all kinds of things about myself, and some of those things I didn’t like.

One truth I discovered was that so many of the choices I made in life were guided by outside forces. For example, did I like punk music because I actually liked it, or because I didn’t fit in with the other Fillipino kids at school? I didn’t pass as Fillipino, but if I did, like my sister, would I have been more into hip hop, like she was? Would I have been on the dance team like she was? Would I have hung out with mostly Asian girls like she did? Was it because I felt like an outsider, looked like an outsider, that I adopted alternative culture and hung out with the alternative kids? Even my whole identity as a zinester and comic artist, did that come about because I was always on the outside, and that was an acceptable hobby for an outsider to do?

Did I marry my husband because he was white, and because society told me white people are better than brown people? All of these truths that came to light… I felt overwhelmed by what I was learning. And I was working on a book in isolation, on top of my regular job, and then also having to struggle with these truths… it was very challenging. It was very hard. It looks very light, the book, but it was really heavy. A lot of crying and talking about it with my therapist and with my husband.

EB: Yeah, one of my writer friends says that all nonfiction writers should always be in therapy. Would you write another memoir again after all that, or did you feel like this was your one memoir and never again? Or was it a good process overall even if it was hard?

MG: It was ultimately a good process. I felt like it was really important that I use my talents to share a story of what it’s like to be first generation American, and the feedback I’ve heard from other people is so wholesome and pure and beautiful and life-affirming. A lot of people wrote and said, this makes me rethink how I see my culture, this makes me want to call my grandma and ask about how she came to the United States, this makes me want to celebrate my ethnicity more. It has been so lovely. It’s a beautiful time. It totally outweighs everything. It washes everything away.

EB: I was going to ask what was the most rewarding this book, and is it that? Connecting with people and sharing your stories?

MG: A benefit of writing memoir is that it is a service to yourself. You discover something about yourself by the end of the book. And if that happens, other people will be able to have that discovery process as well. They will be able to come with you on that emotional journey.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite work of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?MG: I just finished The Body Papers by Grace Talusan. [Editor’s Note: Grace Talusan was also interviewed for this series!] Her book was the other side of the coin of Filipino culture—all the things we as Filipinos are afraid to say out loud. It was so powerful, so brave, I was moved to tears at the end of every chapter.

Photo credit: Andrew Castro