One of the characters had insomnia because Lalami had insomnia while working on the book. “If we knew how difficult it was to write, none of us would be writers,” Lalami said. It took about four and a half years to complete “The Other Americans.” Lalami then wrote 50 pages from different first-person perspectives as an experiment and decided to rewrite the book this way. But her editor asked whether she might be shortchanging the story’s minor characters. Lalami said she initially wrote the book in the third person, focusing on two characters: Driss’ daughter Nora and her friend Jeremy. “Ray Bradbury has this saying, ‘Take a leap and build your wings on the way down.’” When asked how she managed to wrangle all those viewpoints into one story, Lalami responded by paraphrasing another Los Angeles writer. Their interior dialogue also questions American identity and the expectations that come with it. His two adult daughters, widow, a police detective, an immigrant from Mexico, neighbors and a daughter’s high school friend take turns narrating their lives and moving the plot forward to reveal whether Driss’ death was an accident or attack. The novel follows nine characters connected to Driss, the father and husband of a Moroccan immigrant family who made a home in Yucca Valley, Calif. In the first sentence, a Moroccan immigrant and restaurant owner named Driss Guerraoui dies in a hit-and-run at an intersection in a Southern California desert town. During a conversation with Times reporter Lorraine Ali, Lalami said an underrepresentation of cultures in movies and other media motivates her to incorporate Moroccan characters in each of her books.Īli pointed out that “The Other Americans,” Lalami’s fourth novel, isn’t about being Moroccan, but about unraveling a crime story.

A black-and-white childhood photo of Lalami burying her head in the French comic appeared during a video introduction of the author and her work.

The other americans by laila lalami