Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. Forna’s essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013). Forna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize. In 2003, Forna established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone. The charity has also run a number of projects in the spheres of adult education, sanitation and maternal health.
EB: How did you begin writing in general and writing nonfiction specifically? I know that your first book was a memoir—was nonfiction always your first love?
AF: I love fiction and nonfiction fairly equally. I was compelled to write a memoir for reasons which I think are clear: the urgency of responding to the war in Sierra Leone and to the arc of events that began with the murder of my father and ended in the death of tens of thousands. I started my career as a journalist, which was not an occupation I enjoyed for the rigidness of the writing, but I needed a job and what I loved about it was the appeal to my curiosity. Fiction and nonfiction to me are enquires of different kinds. One begins with the question: What if? The other with the statement: What is. As a writer I like to offer a way of seeing what is hidden in plain sight.
EB: At this point, you are the author of a memoir, four novels, and an essay collection. What is your writing process for writing nonfiction versus fiction? What about an essay versus a memoir? Is your approach the same or different?
AF: On my wall I have two pictures by Picasso. Both are of bulls. One bull has been created out of a bicycle seat and handlebars; the other is a painting. I think of nonfiction, be it a full-length memoir, an essay or a novel, as the bicycle seat bull—a ‘found story.’ Whether a ‘found story’ or an imagined story, the questions I ask are much the same. Will it keep me and the reader interested? Who are my main characters? That might be me, or someone in my family, or someone remarkable like Dr. Gudush Jalloh who appears in “The Last Vet.” I have to think about the arc of the narrative, sentences, scenes, dialogue. The one difference, I would say, that exists between the essay and the other forms, is that it is the line of thought that leads the narrative. Nonfiction is more constrained, by factual accuracy. On the plus side, as Gillian Slovo once remarked to me, with nonfiction you always know what your story is. In the writing of fiction, you keep uncovering it.
EB: I loved reading your essay collection The Window Seat. You covered so many subjects—personal, historical, political.How did this book come about?
AF: I used to think of essays as a palate cleanser between novels. I find it hard not to write, but writing a novel is so draining it is hard for me to go straight from one to the next. A good many of the essays in this collection were commissioned, edited, and published by John Freeman. He suggested I put together a collection. I asked him if he would edit it and, happily, he said yes.
EB: I think my favorite aspect of The Window Seat was how varied the essays were—you’d have an essay digging into the history of the war in Sierra Leone only pages away from an essay about why you hate being pulled up on stage during a theatre performance. When it comes to essay collections, I am always interested to know how a writer locates the specific theme that ties all the pieces together. How did you choose what essays would go into The Window Seat? What would you say is the main thread that connects all the essays? Also, how did you decide in what order the essays would appear?
AF: To tell the truth I struggled with the theme. If it was left up to me, I would have bundled all my essays up together and tied them with a bow. John kept saying certain essays didn’t fit. Once he referred to the collection as being held together by ‘voice.’ My publisher had commented once that I had a way of seeing the world few other people had, largely because of my background and life experience. That’s another way of talking about voice. I worked with that idea uppermost in my mind.
As for the order, I more or less ordered them to fit with the timeline of my life. Other things I considered: pacing, shifts of mood. I like to give the reader time to breathe. An essay collection is like a meal, composed of different flavors and textures which complement each other.
EB: I love that idea! A meal of essays. Speaking of voice, something I often struggle with in my own writing is keeping a consistent tone—my voice on the page sounds very different when I am sharing, say, a funny personal story, versus when I am explaining something I have reported on. I loved how no matter what each essay was about, your tone felt consistent—direct, dry, at times darkly funny, knowledgeable. How do you write or edit to make that voice so strong and clear?
AF: I think I figured it out over the course of writing a memoir when I had to create my own voice for the page—both an adult voice and a child’s voice. It’s a learned skill. In life I share a lot of anecdotes, so sometimes when I’m writing I imagine how I would tell the story to a friend, capture that mood or note, and try to get it on the page. ‘Ice,’ one of the shorter essays, began as a story I told Salman Rushdie over dinner. He laughed so much he nearly spat his drink. I went home and wrote it exactly as I had told it that evening.
EB: Another thing I often also think about is length when it comes to writing—could this thing be a short essay, a long essay, or a whole book-length project? I enjoyed how some of your essays in The Window Seat were several thousand words, while others were just a page or two. How do you figure out how long a piece needs to be? How does one determine the best length for an essay?
AF: I write to length.
EB: Do you ever get lonely while writing? Do you have a writing community you rely on for support?
AF: I like being alone, is the truth. Over the years I have made lots of friends who are writers and I love their company, but to be honest we don’t talk about writing very much.
EB: What other writers do you admire or turn to for inspiration? Any particular books or authors who you feel shape your approach to writing in general and writing essays in particular?
AF: I always find it difficult to answer this question, for the reason that I absorb so much from life, from what people say and do, my own reaction. For this collection Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, and Eula Biss acted—if not as direct inspiration, because the book came together over many years and I was introduced to Annie Dillard and Eula Biss relatively late—then as powerful allies.
EB: I love Eula Biss! I interviewed her for this same series. So, what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction, and what do you find most challenging?
AF: The most challenging aspect of nonfiction, I think, is structure. How to hold the arc of the narrative and weave in relevant and engaging factual material. As I said before, the line of enquiry leads for me, the story and other material is woven around it, but these three elements have to work within their own logic. The other is knowing whether you have enough information for a story. That’s not so much a problem with essays or theme led books, but once, for example, I was researching a book about a woman who had been caught up in events of national and international importance. She had agreed to work with me on her story. She was elderly, and as it turned out, dying of cancer. Sadly, she passed away before we could begin. She had come to a time of life when wanted her story told, but try as I might I couldn’t find a way to tell it, even after speaking with her son. The story, as I wished to write it, needed her memories. It is out there now, in a different form. Somebody wrote a history book, which is great, but I wasn’t the writer for that.
The most satisfying aspect of nonfiction is to say what you want to say without the veil of fiction.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man” writer?
AF: Moments that have stayed with me include Annie Dillard’s “The Giant Water Bug” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which begins with an arresting description of a frog being devoured by a water bug. The revelation of what, precisely, is taking place and the mystery is held for two paragraphs. More recently I have enormously enjoyed Eula Biss’s descriptions in Notes from No Man’s Landof New York, a city I also love to hate. Her new book On Having and Being Had describes perfectly my ambivalent relationship to home owning and office work. She has a marvelous way of characterizing people in very short form, for example the colleague she calls ‘Reply All’!