Ismet Prcic talks truth in fiction, immigrant literature, and what he learned from Aleksandar Hemon, in his debut novel, Shards.

Do you think readers will assume all the Ismets in the novel are you?

I hate books that are safe. When you read a memoir, you know terrible things will happen to the author, but you also know the person survived and they’re writing about it. So I was trying to use that as a foil. I don’t even believe that there’s such a thing as nonfiction. That’s what bothers me. We’re living in a society that is actually just a bunch of people agreeing that this is “real.” This piece of paper is $20. I give it to you and you give me something worth $20. But I came from Bosnia where, before the war, you could get bread for the same price as a puff off a cigarette after the war started. It’s whatever we agree on, that’s what the truth is.

Your book could fit into so many subgenres of fiction. What’s the central axis around which everything rotates?

I don’t like to classify, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be dealing with trauma. With the geography of the cure, people think that once you get out of the war zone, everything will be fine. A lot of immigrant fiction is about successful immigrants. You survive hardships, endure, and all is wonderful. But there are all these people who want to go back or who just shrivel and die in a corner of Iowa or New York or wherever. Nobody hears those stories. Even though I’m kind of a poster child of an immigrant who came in and assimilated, I wanted to show what happens in the unsuccessful immigrant story. You cannot run away from war. When I first came here and got PTSD, that was true for me. You live here, but your mind is over there.

Aleksandar Hemon, another Bosnian writer, touches on many similar subjects. Were you influenced by his work?

He was reading in London at a Bosnian arts festival when I was still in my theater phase, around 2000. I started The Question of Bruno and it was like some of the things were ripped out of my life. It was so beautiful and so amazingly written that I thought, “that’s it, I can’t do this,” because at that point I was still learning how to be a writer. It took me a year to write him a letter. By then, I’d started really writing, and I had my own stuff. I asked him how I could put these little pieces of fiction that I had together and how he made it so effortless. He said—and I’m paraphrasing—that there is no form that exists for your life experience. You have to create a form for the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these little pieces, that’s what it is.