Youssef sets out to find Nabil and, much to his surprise, is welcomed into his father’s liberal, sophisticated, yet highly corrupt world. Early on in the novel, he finds out that his long deceased father, whom he believed was a poor, respected schoolteacher, is in fact Nabil Amrani, a wealthy businessman living in the same sprawling city of Casablanca. Youssef El Mekki-for that turned out to be his name-was shy, bookish, gullible, by turns sensitive to others’ feelings and oblivious to them. I followed that image and others like it, pixel by pixel, for the next five years, finding out more about this character as I went along. I had a blurry image in my mind of a young man hands stuffed in his pockets, he was walking home to the shack he shares with his mother after watching a movie at a nearby theater.
(Of course, it always rains in Portland, so this was a wholly unremarkable day.) I took my notebook into the dark living room, sat by the fireplace, and started writing. At the time, I was living in Portland, Oregon. I was still revising Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, but I longed to try my hand at something new.
I remember clearly the day I began working on the manuscript that became Secret Son. Secret Son has just been listed on the longlist of the Orange Prize (congrats!) and below, Laila in her own words gives us a look behind the scenes of writing the book. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. Her first novel, Secret Son, was published in the spring of 2009. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into into six languages. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the “African Booker”) in 2006 and for the National Book Critics’ Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She studied Linguistics at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College London, and the University of Southern California and her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. S ome of you may have heard of Laila Lalami, some of you might not, however here at Farafina we like to celebrate our family of friends, authors, writers, book readers, and Laila just so happens to be one of them.
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