Rick Simonson

A Woman from 'Foreign'
August 12, 2008

Mid-August: those of us in bookstores who work on author readings and signings, whatever else is going on in our bookstores' day-to-day, have our hands on calendars and catalogs. The fall's doings are being actively plotted, scheduled, re-scheduled, postponed, re-configured, confirmed, juggled, tweaked.

And, more imminent (ironically), it is the approach of deadlines with some publishers for requests for the winter and early spring. Wish lists for authors in March and April. It seems almost natural, now, to be thinking of April 2009, imagining this author here, that book in the world. This - in my linited worldview - I can imagine. Can I imagine this country having another president? Really? Yet, that will also have happened by then ... mercy.

All of this plotting and it is almost possible to overlook what's going on within our doors right now. While August author tourings are lighter than, say early October or mid-April, this for us at Elliott Bay this week is still one that includes Adam Davies (Mine All Mine), Amanda Boyden (Babylon Rolling), Sean Carswell and Mickey Hess (Train Wreck Girl and Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory), and Kira Salak (White Mary). (It's also a week that includes the year's first pro football exhibition at the stadium down the street - yikes - fall must be coming.)

And last night, a night that had what was surely a well-attended evening for Thomas Frank (The Wrecking Crew, a book that's off to a great start for us) across town at the University Bookstore, we had our own wonderful, well-attended evening with debut author Sadia Shepard.

Her memoir, The Girl from Foreign (Penguin Press), is one of the more unusual family memoirs to come along in a while. It starts in family mystery - finding that a grandmother she had only known as a devout Muslim had, before marriage, been Jewish, part of a small, particular Jewish community rooted in Bombay/Mumbai. While there have been other recent memoirs that do some of this, it's international scope and run over time reminds one in places of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and another vivid memoir of that era, Yelena Khanga's Soul to Soul.

Ms. Shepard is a lively, forthright presence - a wonderful speaker, engaged, poised, seemingly more seasoned than one would think a first-time author might be. She does have filmmaking work under her belt - but still. her reading, her engagement with the audience, all were a pleasure. It was one of those nights - there had been press listings and our own getting word out, but precious little in the way of reviews or local interviews - when people were seemingly, magically there. One family in attendance, who had read of her and the book in our newsletter, would relate to her their odyssey from India (which as Sadia Shepard says, has a larger Muslim population today than Pakistan) to Pakistan, then Bangladesh, then Seattle. There was also a woman there from the same small Bene Israel community that Sadia herself is descended from.

A pleasure for all that the evening was - a good summons to the present - it also reminded me, as evenings in March or April 2009 (spring's return!) are plotted and imagined, that this night must have been similarly projected way back last November or December.

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 12, 2008 | Comments (0)