Jonas Hassen Khemiri, "The Sisters" (FSG, 2025)

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Chris Holmes
Guest: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Episode: "The Sisters" (FSG, 2025)
Date: September 3, 2025

This episode features author Jonas Hassen Khemiri discussing his epic new novel The Sisters, which explores the sweeping, decades-long story of the Mikola sisters—a trio of Tunisian Swedish siblings growing up on the margins of Stockholm, and later remaking themselves in global cities. Khemiri delves into themes of family, belonging, time, and form, blending autofiction with an emotionally charged narrative. The conversation covers the novel’s genesis, its innovative structure, the role of autobiographical elements, approaches to character and identity, and the challenges of writing about home and diaspora.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis and Scope of The Sisters

• Khemiri's Ambition for Scale
  • Khemiri set out to craft a novel larger in scope than any of his previous works:

    “I think it started with...an ambition to kind of create something on a bigger scale than I’d ever done before.” (05:39)

  • Inspired by reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace — especially the effect of a huge canvas and brief but addictive chapters (06:16).

2. Narrative Structure & Playing with Time

• Structural Innovations
  • Chapters are short and propel the reader forward, mimicking the acceleration of time as experienced by the characters and the author himself:

    “I wanted to try to capture time speeding up...the first book takes place over one year, then six months, then three months, then one month, then one week, one day and one minute.” (08:28)

  • The structure mirrors the emotional drives of the characters, creating an "emotional truth" for readers.
• Purpose of Formal Play
  • For Khemiri, formal experimentation is less about imposed constructs and more about sustaining his own curiosity as a writer:

    “Structure for me has always been something that I build in order to keep myself interested in the project.” (10:35)

3. Sentence-Level Style & The Experience of Time

• Long Sentences & Parentheticals
  • The novel’s style often features long, breathless sentences that evoke experiences of anxiety and a resistance to closure:

    “Many of these characters have a hard time ending their sentences. They continue...that everything is connected.” (12:04)

  • Parallels are drawn between the structure of sentences and the characters’ life struggles—especially their inability to say goodbye, deal with loss, or end things.

4. Family Curses, Competing Narratives, and Identity

• Themes of Curses and Contradictory Family Lore
  • The sisters’ mother insists they are cursed: “everything you love, you will lose”—a metaphor for the curse of time and loss (14:21).
  • Their father instead asserts they are descended from builders of the Rockefeller Center, framing them as inheritors of permanence and achievement (15:30).
  • The sisters live between these competing narratives, wrestling with personal and generational trauma versus aspiration.

5. Parentheses, Patterns, and Autobiography

• Formal Experimentation with Parentheses

  • At one point, a sentence unfurls with multiple closing parentheses—a metaphor for thoughts and memories nesting endlessly:

    “What was it, thirteen parentheses at that moment?” (19:16)

  • Khemiri likens arranging thoughts in parentheses and chapters to assembling a book series or conducting chemistry—placing disparate elements side-by-side to watch new patterns emerge.

• Fiction/Nonfiction Friction

  • The narrative alternates between “fictional” chapters and “autobiographical” ones from a character named Jonas, blending fact and fiction in a way Khemiri hadn’t encountered previously:

    “There was a lot of energy between the fictional sections and the so-called non fictional chapters...there was an energy there and...I kept doing it for 6–700 pages.” (23:22)

  • These autobiographical sections allowed Khemiri to make sense of intensely personal memories that felt “too small” or too lifelike for fiction until they were set beside the sisters’ story (24:22).

6. On Home, Belonging & Global Movement

• The Search for Home
  • The sisters and Jonas never feel quite at home—wherever they are, they live in an “almost but never quite” state, both in Stockholm and as they migrate between New York, Paris, and Tunis:

    “They have spent their whole lives feeling almost but never quite...when do we feel at home? When do we feel like we can exist without that doubt?” (42:07)

  • Each sister has different strategies for finding home—through structure, adaptability, or sensory “add-ons.”

7. Evolving Characters & “Superhero” Fantasies

• Humanizing the Sisters
  • Initial drafts attempted to give the sisters “superhero” qualities but shifted when Khemiri realized the importance of letting the characters be deeply, messily human:

    “I had the feeling that the sisters almost sat me down and said, like, we need you to allow us to be human in this book…with all our flaws, with all our mess up, with all our complications.” (32:27)

  • Letting go of control and embracing complexity allowed Khemiri to engage with his own vulnerabilities, including family curses and struggles with depression.

8. Intertextuality and Influences

• Nods to Other Family Epics
  • The sisters’ story deliberately echoes classic family novels, with Chris noting parallels to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters.
  • Khemiri confirms The Makioka Sisters was a talisman on his research shelf while writing:

    “My bookshelf...was suspiciously empty, but the one book that I had on my shelf was the Makioka Sisters.” (51:33)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On structure and inspiration:

  “I wonder what happens if I expand my canvas?” (06:16, Khemiri)

• On time’s acceleration:

  “The structure of the book is...the first book takes place over one year, then six months, then three months, then one month, then one week, one day and one minute.” (08:28, Khemiri)

• On sentence style and theme:

  “Many of these characters have a hard time ending their sentences...they have a hard time saying goodbye. They have a hard time dealing with death. They have a hard time ending their sentences.” (12:04, Khemiri)

• On the competing family myths:

  “The curse basically says, everything you love, you will lose. And ultimately that is the curse of time, right?” (14:21, Khemiri)

  “You’re actually...related to constructors of high rises...maybe not internal, but it’s definitely stable and around.” (15:30, Khemiri)

• On blending fiction and autobiography:

  “I sensed that there was energy there and...I kept doing it for 6–700 pages. And it created something that kept me intrigued.” (23:22, Khemiri)

• On home and security:

  “What does it actually mean to give your kids security?...Isn’t that also security, that you can give your children a sense of whatever happens? You got this.” (28:03–29:19, Khemiri)

• On humanizing his characters:

  “We need you to allow us to be human in this book. We’re not going to have superpowers...we need to have the right to exist in this book...with all our flaws, with all our mess up, with all our complications.” (32:27, Khemiri)

• On globality and feeling “almost but not quite”:

  “...these sisters have spent their whole lives feeling almost but never quite, be it on a dance floor in Stockholm...when do we feel at home?” (42:07, Khemiri)

• On intertextuality:

  “The one book that I had on my shelf was The Makioka Sisters.” (51:33, Khemiri)

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Important Timestamps

• 05:18 – Khemiri joins, discusses the novel's origins and ambitions.
• 06:16 – Tolstoy’s influence and the decision to use short, propulsive chapters.
• 08:28 – On capturing the acceleration of time in the novel’s structure.
• 12:04 – Sentence-level style reflecting the characters’ inability to let go.
• 14:21 – Explanation of the sisters’ family curse and competing narratives.
• 19:16 – Discussion of formal experimentation with parentheses.
• 23:22 – On alternating fictional and autobiographical chapters.
• 28:03–29:19 – Relocating his family, and reflections on security.
• 32:27 – Letting go of “superhero” stereotypes to embrace human complexity.
• 42:07 – The characters’ lifelong sense of “almost but never quite” at home.
• 51:33 – The Makioka Sisters as an influence and writing talisman.

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Book Recommendations by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (46:26–50:29)

• The Bible (read for research and as part of a new project)
• Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
  • Particularly valuable for writers working outside their first language
• Selma Lagerlöf, The Treasure (1904)
  • “A remarkable novel with a subtle feminist theme, dark and gothic.”
• Dantiel M. W. Moniz, Milk Blood Heat
  • “A remarkable book”—the recent title he most often gives as a gift.

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Tone & Style

The episode is warm, deeply reflective, and often confessional in tone. Khemiri and Holmes explore the craft of fiction and the emotional stakes of storytelling with both intellectual rigor and humility. Khemiri is candid about his process, the vulnerabilities that surface in writing, and the indispensable role of literary art in stitching together the disjointed experiences of his own and his characters’ lives.

Transcript

[Chris Holmes]

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[Marshall Po]

Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Chris Holmes]

I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous [e-mail] and on Instagram and Twitter urnedbybooks. Let's start the show. Great family novels define the epochs of literary history. And so often the very best of those novels are focused on oddball siblings who mesmerize those around them. For better or worse, these eccentric families wind their way through Austen and the Brontes, Tolstoy, Tanizaki, Franzen. Just to name a notable few. Perhaps in the end it is because we all see our own families as impossible and strange to the outside world that we find so much room in our imaginations for the great novels of domestic drama. Jonas Hassan Kamiri has written a truly great family novel, the Sisters, and this epic work of fiction, running over 600 pages, is his very first novel written in English. The story of the Mikola sisters, Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia, comes to us as a global story of self discovery where three sisters of Tunisian Swedish heritage grow up in Stockholm, always on the periphery of that culture and find themselves remade in metropolitan spaces of the global north and south, losing loves and each other at various moments in their explorations. We live always on the outside of the sisters lives with a third person narrative, trading off sisters to understand them across the decades. But most importantly, we live with the interspersed first person accounts of Jonas, a Tunisian Swede of similar age who is swept up into the sisters chaotic wake. Through Jonas's eyes we'll understand their worst traits and impulses as an impossibly attractive magnet into a mirror world to Jonas's own dysfunctional transnational family. Crafted in exquisitely textured scenes from the dance floors in a Stockholm club to see a seedy apartment building in Tunis to the dense flood of New York City's Brownian motion, the Sisters makes us both family member and obsessive neighbor of the Sisters. By turns, it is impossible to look away from the sisters lives as we watch them pull apart and then reconstitute as an amoebic being that may indeed have room always for one more. The prose is lively and often running at full speed across the page, and in that way it is seamless with its focal characters. The Sisters is one of my favorite novels of the last few years and I cannot wait for you to live in its world. Jonas Hassan Kamiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than 35 languages. The family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and Invasion won an Obie Award for Best Script. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his family and teaches creative writing at New York University. Welcome to Burned by Books, Jonas.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Very happy to be here.

[Chris Holmes]

The Sisters is simply a masterwork of fiction. It is epic in time and scope and character. When did the germ of the novel first come into existence and what is the history of the novels coming into being as the book that I hold before me now.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I think it started with a. An ambition to kind of create something on a bigger scale that I'd ever done before. I mean, this book is kind of. You mentioned the length, and thank you for that beautiful introduction. It. It just warms my heart to hear that. That you have enjoyed spending time with these sisters. Because I did, too. When I was writing it, I. I felt like I was hanging out with them and that they, on some level, almost like saved my life. I really needed them when I was writing about them. And I think that. I mean that. That it makes me really happy to hear that you had a similar experience reading, reading those.

[Chris Holmes]

I absolutely did.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

And then, you know, the question of Genesis, where something starts. I mean, I. It's always tricky to know, but I remember thinking about size and the size of my canvas, my literary canvas, you know, and I was reading, you know, not to compare myself with Tolstoy, of course, but I was reading War and Peace, and I had never read it before. And I realized that he managed to create some. A reading experience that was different than anything I'd experienced before because the. His canvas was so huge, but the chapters were fairly short, so it. It was quite hard to stop reading, even when I was bored. You know, he. You know, of course, when you read Anna Karenina, he's, you know, objectively kind of a. More. A better. Whatever better means. And when you're. When you're trying to become a better writer. But like, he, He. He's in more like he's in better control of his own tools, I would say. When War and Peace. One of the things that I loved about that book, and it's one of my favorite novels, is the fact that you can see him kind of getting lost on the page and then finding his way. And, you know, Tulsa has made all this research as he kind of crams into the book and then he over explains it towards him. But then there are these, like, beautiful scenes and the chapters. The brevity of the chapters makes. It's quite tricky to stop reading. So that was one impulse where I kind of went like, I wonder what if I could just be inspired by slash copy Tolstoy's form? Like, what. What happens if I expand my canvas? And I want. I wanted to write something about where I follow three. My three. Three main characters over the course of like 30, 35 years, but then kept the chapters fairly short. What would that look like? So that was one kind of question that I. That I had at the beginning.

[Chris Holmes]

And it does drive you Forward to that. Those shorter chapters. I started noticing them about a quarter of the way through, and I was like, oh, this is. This is a form. And I love the way you describe it as a. As a, you know, a very broad, large tapestry, but with these, yeah, you know, nicely packaged, speedy chapters.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yes. And speed is such an important concept in this book because the other thing that I was aiming to do that I, you know, I was. Made me curious was that I had. When I started writing it, I had, you know, I passed 40. I was 42, 43 when I started writing it. And I had this feeling that time was continuously accelerating. I kind of sat and thought about the summer that had just passed, and I realized that it felt like that summer had taking place, you know, that it had taken, like, in my experience, it had just, you know, swooshed by in kind of a couple of days. Actually, it's been like 10 or 12 weeks. Then I started thinking about the summers of my childhood and kind of how. How time felt like it passed a lot slower back then. So with other kind, you know, starting point of the novel was just. I kept thinking, like, I wonder if I can write a novel where I tried to capture what time feels like, especially this acceleration of time. I had this. This idea of writing something larger, and then I had the idea that I wanted to try to capture time speeding up. So the structure of the book is actually we follow these three sisters as they desperately try to escape a curse. That's one of the main themes of the book. And try to find their home and that we follow them. The first book takes place over the course of one year, then six months, then three months, then one month, then one week, one day and one minute. So the. I just tried to see what happens if. If I created a structure that did that. And I think that is also part of why this book seems to be, you know, why. Why readers seem to be responding well to this book. I think that. That. That there's an emotional truth in that structure that I think mimics some of the. The struggles that the characters go through. And that has always been my. My. You know, one of the many reasons why I love writing novels is that you can. You know, sometimes we think that we have to use existing structures when we create novels. And. And I think it's the opposite. We need to kind of sit down and think about, like, structure as. Rather than something that we create in order to make the reader feel a certain thing. I think structure for me has always been something that I build in order to keep myself interested in the project. And once I started doing that, I just kept finding new ways and new structures and new. I mean, my. My work as a novelist became so much more fun when I started doing that. So you can see that from my first novel to. To this one, we see this. I'm basically trying to use this classical form, tell fairly old stories about families and curses, and then see what happens when I collide them with more emotional and contemporary forms.

[Chris Holmes]

I would say I want to stay with form and style to talk a little bit about your sentence work, which is, you know, you talked about speed and time and how experiences of time change as we age. And. And I. I felt like you wanted to do that for the reader so that we would have experiences of. Of speed in the sentence level. Because you have these wonderful sometimes page. Page and a half long sentences that represent formally. Exactly. An experience of sometimes anxiety, sometimes a sense of like something like unspooling in front of you that you don't want unspooled. And I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about kind of speed on the sentence level.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. And I think that. That once you start thinking about time as. As a limitation and time as something that we. That it. Time as a concept that is continuously running out, you know, that we have to care for, you start asking yourself, what is. What am I actually doing with my time? What am I focusing on? And I think you can see that on the sentence level because many of these characters have a hard time ending their sentences. Let's put it that way. They. They can. Yeah. They continue seem to think that everything is connected, you know, so. So this is the opposite of kind of like a minimalist take where. Where. Where you. I mean, they. In their minds, everything. I think they have a hard time saying goodbye. They have a hard time dealing with death. They have a hard time ending their sentences. So. And, you know, it. It creates this. I was in conversation with the lovely Tusconti at the New Republic Library, and he. She said that for her, when she read it, it almost felt like a confession. But a confession made by a. What did she say? Like a rapper or something like that. We ended up talking about Old Dirty Bastard, like in a confession, you know, And I like that because it's. You're completely right that the sentences feel like they. There's a. There's an unwillingness to end. And I think that is also. I mean, it's linked to the bigger theme of the book, like what do we actually. If we start thinking about what we. What we're supposed to dedicate our time to, one of the bigger questions that the book asks is kind of should we focus our time on. On building our relationships or should we focus our. Our time on building physical objects or. Or books or art or. Because the sisters, they grew up with this. I mean, they. They grew up with two kind of competing stories. They grew up with one story that their sis. Their mother keeps telling them that actually they are. Someone has put a curse on them and they have to flee this curse. The curse basically says, everything you love, you will lose. And ultimately that is the curse of time. Right. We all, we are all facing some version of that.

[Chris Holmes]

That curse.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

But the sisters, they are convinced that this curse is, I call it, like semi true. You know, these, these stories that we believe about ourselves, but we don't really believe in them. But once we. We're in a certain mood or we have a bad day or we haven't drunk our coffee, all of a sudden the stories become true. Is, Is that kind of narrative? You know, I don't think they actually believe it, but once they start losing people, friends, lovers, husbands, they always have that narrative in the background thinking, what if this story is actually true? So that's one of the kind of themes that is. That's. That. That's kind of one version of their lives that they are. They are trying to escape from. Could say. And the other narrative is. Is actually kind of the opposite, is that their dad has convinced that actually they're not cursed at all. They're related to one of the men who built this famous high rise in New York, the Rockefeller Center. At some point, he's shown them, you know, this famous photo lunch atop a skyscraper with these steelworkers who. I mean, everyone has seen this photo, you know, the, the.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, maybe the most iconic of. Of early New York.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Exactly. You see Central park in the background. They are kind of. One of them is like reading. One of them has hopefully water in a bottle. It kind of looked like you. So we've all seen this photo, and their dad basically says actually don't believe in that curse. You're actually, you're. You're related to constructors of high rises. You're, You're. You're related to people who have built something who is. Maybe not internal, but it's, it's definitely stable and around. So these two, they grew up at these competing stories. And one of the questions that the sisters ask themselves and also that I've kept Asking myself when I was writing this book is kind of, how do we. Who do. How do we balance our time? Like, how do we. Should we focus more on building metaphorical buildings books or should we take care of our relationships and the. I mean, of course it's not an either or question, but that balance is important to get right.

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[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

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[Chris Holmes]

You were made to outdo your holiday. Your hammocking and you're pooling. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel the Another sort of formal version of this kind of ceaseless thinking and wanting the sentence never to end is the marvelous use of parentheses in one specific moment. It's Jonas. And there's a. There's a way in which the parenthetical also works really powerfully here, even when you're not using parentheses so much, especially of Jonas's kind of narrative is, well, then I remember this about this sister. And then I remember this. And then, you know, this particular event swings me over there almost like everything has a little parentheses attached to it. And I wonder if that. That one moment in which we end with like 13 parentheses at the end of the sentence, whether that had a. A wider range than just that one formal moment for you.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I've always loved book series and I wondered why, you know, that I get an immense pleasure of like buying all Rachel Cusk books and then just putting them side by side and just creating a little family. Rachel Cusk, you know, and I, I have my Knozkard shelf. I have my, you know, Edouard Louis shots. Like I, I just enjoy creating a pattern out of, you know, creating patterns, I guess creating in way families. And I wonder sometimes if that's. If I do something similar in my writing where you kind of go, well, the. I'm not sure all of these things or thoughts or elements or friends are actually related. But what if I put them side by side and see what happens? What if I remember that particular the. What was it? Thirteen parentheses, like at that moment?

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

One of the things that. That Jonas is trying to make sense of there is actually related to Rock of Alicentre and kind of the class perspective of the book. He's trying to make sense of his own relationship to being middle class, but romanticizing the working class. So he has two parents who come from different backgrounds. His father was born in Tunisia in a poor. You know, he comes from a poor background, and his mother is from a more stable Swedish middle class background. And his father has this idea, I mean, just like my father had this idea that he at some point will be able to unlock and defeat injustice if he gets rich enough. So money is the key to unlocking kind of future happiness, future liberty, basically becoming himself through wealth. And then he has a bunch of different projects. I mean, today, I guess you would call them side hustles in order to become rich, basically. And none of these, you know, he never succeeds. And my father had a similar thing. He had so many ideas, so many dreams that he never resulted in, I mean, anything really. But he was a. He was a. He was an amazing dreamer. He had so much energy when he dreamt. Not as good. I mean, not as good at. He was an amazing dreamer and carrying through those dreams were kind of harder for him. But I. I wonder if time to like that discussion about like being middle class but then romanticizing the working class at the same time. Trying to create the narrative early on in life. I think that is something that the Jonas character in the book does a lot of. And I have done that too. So I think that the. The link between the parentheses and the. The book series, basically, that I. I've enjoyed and I keep enjoying creating patterns and putting things, just taking different ingredients and just putting them side by side just to see what happens. A lot of my. My creative work is. I mean, sometimes it feels like I'm in. I'm in a research lab where I kind of take different elements and I put them side by side, almost like a chemist does, I think. I'm not. I've never been in it, in an actual lab, but I guess that's what they do. I remember George Horns talking at some point about characters, how we get to know them, that we have to put them under pressure. And that's what chemists do. You put like your elements under pressure. And I do something similar in my work in this particular book. One of the things that I kept doing was just alternating between telling the fictional story about these sisters and then just every other chapter is autobiographical or you could say just started out with me writing down a personal memory. So that was, I wasn't sure why that, why I needed that form, but I recognized that when I did that something happened. There was an energy in the book. So we have fiction, nonfiction, fiction, nonfiction. And then the more we read we realized that the boundary between these two ingredients are kind of, I would say blurred. So this is just pop up in Jonas's world the other way around.

[Chris Holmes]

Yep. And I mean I, I wanted very much to, to talk about this, this friction between them. I wouldn't have called it until you said that autobiographical because I didn't know. I mean we're led to, because of the name and, and aspects about age and, and being a Tunisian Swede to think that there's some, some kind of connection between you and the illness of the, of the chapters. But there's certainly the, the friction between what feels explicitly fictional in that third person limited or third person, you know, maybe even we want to call it a free and direct narrative and then that first person. But I wonder if you talk about how you decided to have this auto fictional or, or whatever you want to call it, autobiographical element come in because it's such a, it's, it's an important thing to the fiction, but clearly it embodies a lot of non fictional elements.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yeah, I, I hadn't seen it done in this way before, so I wanted to try it and I noticed that there was a lot of energy between the fictional sections and the so called non fictional chapters. So that was my, I mean I, it's much less about theory and much, much, much less about brain and much more about heart when I write. And I just trusted that. I, I sensed that there was energy there and then I tried to keep doing it and then I kept doing it for 6, 700 pages. And it created something that kept me intrigued. I also noticed that, I mean the, the Jonas in the book is he's trying to get to know these sisters because he doesn't know who he is. So in a way he's understanding himself through them. And in reality that is what I did as a writer. I, I, I had a bunch of personal memories that I had never been able to write down in Swedish and I couldn't make sense of them. You know, I couldn't transform them in, in into novels because like, or into stories because they just felt too lifelike and Too small, in a way. But once I put these memories next to the, the stories of the sisters, all of a sudden they started to make sense. And maybe that is what I. Why I write, you know, that maybe that is a way for me to, to create meaning in my life, to. To have a sense of purpose, to. To create a bigger story out of all these, you know, the randomness of life. That is at least for me as a person who, who didn't grow up with any faith. Transforming my life into, or maybe like looking at my life through the lens of a novel has always brought me immense joy. And I mean, before I was a writer, I did that as a reader. You know, I looked at my life through the lens of the worlds of, you know, writers like Astrid Lindgren or Susan. You know, I remember reading Outsiders as a kid. I was just like that, you know, speaking of sibling rivalry. I don't. Did you read that one? Like the classic? I guess it's a young adult novel.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, yeah. No, I, I remember reading it in, in middle school and being totally entranced.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

That broke my heart. Yeah. Yeah. I remember thinking also, like, you know, it's the first person. I mean, I haven't read. Read it. I haven't read it in many, many years now, but in this, at least in the, the person that I read a Swedish translation, her name was. I think it was just SE Hinton.

[Chris Holmes]

Yes, SE Hinton. Yeah, that's right.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

SE Hinton. And the, you know, the, the. It's written in first person and the narrator is a boy. And I remember looking at the author photo, realizing that she was a girl and there's like almost, you know, hallucinating effect where I realized that this is space where you can make shit up. You're. You're allowed to play here because the re that like the world of these three brothers who are the main characters of Outsiders, they, I mean, that world felt so real to me that I couldn't imagine the world was made up. And then she reminded me that actually that that was the case. And so, so I, you know, the meaning making tendency has been there since I was a kid, you know, getting that through, through reading. And now, you know, for the last 21 years, I've done that as a writer as well. But it's a similar process. It is, it's an attempt at making sense of my experiences. And one of the joys of writing this particular novel was that these sisters have been looking for home all their life. I mean, they've been looking for a feeling since they were young, but they have that. They rarely experience the feeling of home, the feeling of connection. Is it.

[Chris Holmes]

Is it Ina, who describes it as. As security? Like her, she's having the. I think she's having that conversation with her mom at the. At the dinner out with. With Hector, and she said, you know, that's what. That's what you didn't give us. You didn't give us security. And it's.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yeah.

[Chris Holmes]

For me, I think one of the things that Jonas is so attracted to about the sisters is that he sees in them that lack of a solid ground underneath them in. In a way that he often experiences.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yeah. I mean, the question of security is so interesting because what does it actually mean to give your kids security? I mean, I think about that because we moved to the US four years ago. Our kids were 5 and 8 at the time.

[Chris Holmes]

They didn't speak Sweden.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Before that, we were in Stockholm. Sweden. Yeah. So I actually, we. We moved to New York because I got a fellowship at the New York Public Library in order to finish this book, actually. So we moved and I had this, you know, had a lot of thoughts about security. What does it mean to give my kids stability? Because, you know, we just have this memory of waving goodbye to them the first day in school and, you know, just a beautiful public school in Brooklyn. But from a Swedish perspective, that school looked like a prison. You know, security guards. And I was about to say electric fences, but there were no electric fences. But it felt like the fences were lecturing. It didn't. It didn't look like a school in Sweden, you know, and they had to put on face mask on and imagine going to work tomorrow and you don't speak the language. That's a. That's a tricky workday. You know, we kind of just. We just sent them off into that place and we could, you know, they. They. And then you could say, well, that's not stability. That's not security. But in essence, if you think about it, two weeks later they had friends, Two months later they came home and kind of, you know, start. They started dreaming in English and started communicating in English and kind of their English was, you know, flawless. Isn't that also security that you can give your children a sense of whatever happens? You got this.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

And I think that is something that, you know, we. We can. It would be easy to say that the mom and, you know, the mom and in the novel, just like my dad in the novel and a lot of the characters in books, you know, she has her. Maybe she's not the most stable person, but one of the things she gives her. Her daughters is this feeling of whatever happens, you. You will have each other and you will always be there for each other. And these three sisters, they go, well, I mean, you, you, you summarize it beautifully in your introduction that, you know, they, they. There's a lot of love between them. There's also a lot of frustration and betrayal and complication between them. But ultimately, what we learn over these years as we follow their stories, that they will never let go of each other. Whatever happens, they will be there.

[Chris Holmes]

One of the things I loved about first meeting the sisters is, is we kind of meet them two or three times in, in different moments. We have the beginning where we're meeting them at this, at this club and they're going to, you know, Ina knows, you know, just in her gut that they're going to in some way abandon her, during which is sort of her worst fear. And then she has this kind of meetup with a. With a guy who will become her husband. And, and, and we meet the, the sisters there. They're described by maybe their kind of principle, at least from the outside personality quirk or, or detail. You know, everyone wants to talk to Evelyn and she's, she's just this sort of the, the narrative core of the sisters and she can keep spinning stories and Anastasia is just, you know, so interesting and, and vibrant and, you know, but then we meet them again through Jonas's eyes and, and Jonas's, you know, friends. And they're seen as eccentric oddballs. They'll see. They're seen as, you know, total outsiders. They can't be, they can't be Swedish. They've got to be something else. And they'll be, you know, reflected upon by neighbors as just sort of let. To, you know, go to seed outside there. No, no limits and controls. And I liked the way that the, the story wants to keep reintroducing them because they're not fixed. They're not just those, those characteristics. They develop and change and evolve into things that are very different. I wonder if you could talk about how they evolve and what this kind of process of reintroducing them is in.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

The novel, hearing you say that, I had the mental image of multiple parentheses. Again, Ina is the control freak, but she, she's the older sister, but she's also longing for. To be loved. She's. And maybe part of this, what is going on in the novel is that they are continuously trying to be more than just one thing. I like that do you know what I mean? Like, I think that there's an enormous pressure. I mean, I don't even want to say the word social media, but like, there's, there's enormous pressure on us to kind of be one thing, to, to define us through one image in one quote, in one bio, whatever that is. But like, the, the. And I think I was guilty of that early on when I started writing this book too. I, I, I wanted the sisters to be one thing, actually. I wanted. During an early meeting with my editor, I remember saying to him that I'm, you know, kind of binge watched a bunch of Marvel, Marvel movies with my kids. And I said, I, I think this is, you know, it's time for me to write my superhero novel. I want these sisters to have superhero powers. And he was, you know, he's an amazing reader and he's kind but honest. And he was like, yeah, you, if that's what you need to do, you do your thing. But I think what I was trying to say or what I was trying to do earlier was to control them and to give them one or two superhero powers. And I remember early on in the book when I realized that this book would be actually become a novel was when the, I had the feeling that the sisters almost sat me down and said, like, we need you to allow us to be human in this book. We're not going to have superpowers. You know, no one is going to like, be able to fly or levitate or walk through walls. We need to have the right to exist in this book, but also we need to, you need to allow us to be human with all our flaws, with all our mess up, with all our complications. And as soon as I allow them to do that, I think it unlocked something in me because it made it possible for me to do something similar to kind of allow me to, to show some of those traits that I have been hiding for many years. And part of the, you know, the, the, the elements that were, for me as a writer kind of like that felt shameful to, to, to write about were the, these episodes of like, challenges with depression or. In the book, the, the Jonas character battles something called the hyena, which is kind of like his inner voice that is trying to destroy him, that he has to challenge in order to survive. So ultimately, you know, we could say that this, this book is about, you know, at first glance, it looks like these sisters are fighting a curse that is invented by their mother, but there's also a curse in the book that is I mean, real in the sense that I, I grew up with a feeling of having been cursed by my father and by something he said after my. My. My parents got. Got divorced. And I think that is also the reason why they, you know, why they are trying to escape their curse. You know, that the. These curses are very different and both of these curses are in. Are in the book. But ultimately the, The. The. There are more links between the lives of the sisters and my life than I understood when I started writing it. And part of the healing work for me was to kind of allow the sisters to be human. And then I had to do the same thing when I wrote about myself, I guess, or, you know, in the book. Let's. Let's make a clear distinction between the two.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, well, one of the. I mean, speaking of curses, there's many intertexts going on here, and one of them that I, That I felt not as an explicit intertext, but one that shared enough commonality, that felt like it was doing it was affecting my reading anyway. And that's the narrative voice in the Virgin Suicides, the Jeffrey Eugenides novel, because we have, you know, in that case, a cursed family, an eccentric family of. Of sisters that are impossibly interesting to the point of obsession, to a chorus, a kind of Greek chorus of neighborhood boys. And even though Jonas is. Is. Is a real, fully formed, textured character and, and they are not in the novel, I felt that that narrative perspective and an obsession over the idea of a family that seemed to be operating with a real curse in a world where lots of people feel like they're cursed in. In less formal ways. And so, you know, is that a book that's important to you at all? And, and when you're thinking about the, the curse, do we all imagine ourselves cursed in in some way? Whether it's something a parent says to us that sort of sits like a, like albatross on our shoulder, or whether it's something more explicit, like, you know, a grandparent saying, you're cursed.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I think we all have thoughts that we're trying to. To avoid thinking. And I think we all, as a collective, lose a lot of energy once we try to suppress those thoughts. So that storyline, I, you know, we don't know each other. We. We just met for this chat, but if we knew each other and if we spent a couple of hours together, I think we would get a sense of what we're trying to not think. Do you know what I mean? Like, we, We. We all have like a. An interior hidden monologue that we're trying to avoid. And I think that there's a lot of potential energy. We can find a lot of energy if we try to investigate what we're trying to avoid. Thinking at least that. That. That has been kind of my experience both in writing this book, but also living. Living my life. What I realized, I mean, to be. To. To move from theory into more kind of a practical thing was that I. I realized after my father. My parents got divorced that it kind of. My father said a couple of things. Basically, he went before he left my mom and my mom wanted the divorce. And then he turned to my mom and kind of said, you know, you will never be able to raise these three sons on your own. You will. They will end up like, homeless and, you know, drug addicts. I mean, he just. He was hurt and he. I don't think he knew what he was saying.

[Chris Holmes]

He just said things.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

But I remember that moment of like, he left and we. We lost contact and for a couple of years. But I remember inviting that voice into my head and thinking, whatever happens, I know that that will never be true. So it was almost like as when he physically disappeared out of my life. I invited the voice to have some kind of relationship to him into my head. And this sounds potentially a bit weird to walk around with the voices of the people you've lost, but I think we do some version of that. Whenever I've lost someone, I've heard their voice very clearly in my head. And whenever I lost a person to, you know, death or to just through. Just due to life, so to speak, there. I've had a tendency, at least in my creative practice to try to recreating, using my sentences, to try to heal the loss by writing about them. And you can see that that's like a red thread through all of my writing, kind of. Is it possible to replace someone. That someone or something that we have lost with the use of like, writing or words? Basically in my mind. One part of what I found fascinating when writing this book was that I, you know, I tried a bunch of strategies where I stopped. I tried to stop. Reduce the energy that I put on not thinking certain thoughts. So I. I mean, I developed kind of a. I used some. I was influenced by a technique called act. Like, act.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I just realized that. That. That I was doing that. That I. That I. So instead of. I developed a. Some strategies where I would invite the forbidden thoughts rather than pushing them down into the subconscious, so to speak. And I found that to be incredibly effective. I Just found that to be. And maybe, maybe especially if you, you know, you're. You're a big reader, you spend a lot of time with sentences and if you do that, I think you might be. Maybe the, the. These strategies might be even more effective. Basically what Jonas does in, in the book, you know, he kind of uses his. The stuffies of his kids and tries to give the hyena voice to the stuffies and tries to, yeah, tries to make the, tries to invite the voices rather than. Than push them down. And writing this book was an act of doing something similar. A lot of the things that I told myself that I wasn't allowed to think I was able to write about in this book.

[Chris Holmes]

So I. Without calling it a global novel in the sense of that term from the early 21st century, which had some, Some pretty exacting characteristics. There's a. There's a real intangible globality to the sisters. With movement from Stockholm to New York City and Paris and Tunis, Tunisia, that begins to operate as a way of revealing character in the sisters and Jonas. Anastasia must go to Tunisia to under. Understand herself as queer and linked to a place that was only really something of her imagination in the way that, you know, we have the appearance of Edward Said in the novel, who talks about, you know, Palestine as a. A nation of the imagination. And Evelyn will disappear into New York City, which provokes Jonas's own awakening. And Stockholm is the home that is always almost but never quite home in the minds of the characters. How did you imagine these very different cities and countries opening up character for us?

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

That's beautiful almost, but never quite. I think these sisters have spent their whole lives feeling almost but never quite be it on a dance floor in Stockholm, be it, you know, and when they're taking a language course in Tunisia, be it, you know, walking down Madison Avenue in Manhattan almost, but not quite. So what does that mean? Like when. When do we feel at home? When do we feel like we can exist? Without that doubt. I think these three sisters, they have like different strategies to create that feeling of connection, you know, and, and we see them desperately trying over the course of the book, you know, that they're. I mean, I think that Ina uses structure to create the feeling of like you're filling up potential home or temporary home structure, graphs, Excel sheets, you know, whatever she can to kind of systems, you know, and I, I've done that. And I've done that too. I mean, writing is a form of creating that stability. I think Evelyn, the middle sister, I think she, she creates A feeling of connection through. She has a chameleon like aspect to her. You know, she keeps shape shifting. She, she is always. She can be anyone in a way. She, she can change her voice, she can tell the new story, always change, tell a new story to kind of fit in in a way. And I've done that too. I've used that strategy to feel connected, to feel at home. And, and Anastasia, she uses, I mean she has this thing that I also did when I was in my. More when I was in my 20s and maybe early 30s where I had this feeling that when I didn't feel at home enough, I would need to add something in order to feel at home. So I would add music, I would add drugs, I would add. Yeah, she, she needs to sprinkle life with add ons in in order to feel home, feel at home. And, and so we see this thesis just desperately trying to create a feeling of connection during this book. But like the, the only thing that actually works seems to be the connection that they have with them, with themselves and with their siblings. And ultimately that's kind of one of the bigger emotional changes in the novel is that, you know, they, when we meet them, they have a sense of like, you know, they are in Stockholm, but they have a sense of like we're here but our actually actual home is somewhere else. And Ina tries to find it in love, Anastasia trying to find it in Tunisia, Evelyn tries to find it and shape shifting maybe. But they also have this dream place. They project a lot of dreams onto New York, thinking that once they reach New York they will finally feel at home. And if this were a novel, they would come to New York and they will feel great. It's almost a novel. They come to New York and there's a clash between dream and reality. Right. So kind of Ina hates it here. Anastasia is like, I can't wait to go home. And Evelyn enough is the one who feels like there's something about this energy in the city that makes me want to stay forever. And in that sense I think that I'm. I mean there's a. There's definitely an Evelyn living inside of me because that's. Every time when I, I feel some of that energy. When, when, even when I came to New York for the first time when I was 18 years old, I had that feeling like I'm not, I'm not sure this is the safest place or the best place or the most logical place to be in. There's something about the energy in this air, the energy here. That I, that, that. That I'm addicted to.

[Chris Holmes]

Jonas has that great line where he says that he was told that you always remember your, Your first kiss, your. Is it your first girlfriend or. And then the first time that you. That you fly over New York City.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yeah.

[Chris Holmes]

And I don't. I never flew to New York City, but I definitely remember as a kid the first time I went to the city and just being sort of bowled over by its, Its energy. And I. And I find that whenever I visit, it's. It's never a place that I can imagine living, but it is a place that's impossible to forget because of that energy.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Holmes]

Jonas, before I let you go, I'd love to know a little bit about what you've been reading and loving recently and if you have any recommendations for us.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yes, I mean, I, I'm currently reading this book that you might have heard of called the Bible. It is a. I mean, I've, I.

[Chris Holmes]

Have heard of it.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

You've heard of it, has great, good readers. Reviews. No, but like, the. I've read the Bible. I've read. I've never. I'm, I'm. I'm reading the Bible just based on. I'm writing something new. And I realized that I have never read it, and I've never read it in the way I'm. I'm following like a reading time where I read it chronologically. So that's kind of fun. It's just a different way of experiencing it. I mean, the Bible, but that's not. That doesn't feel fun to. I mean, that's. What can I. I mean, I'm. I'm thinking of some of the books that were important when I was writing the Sisters, and one of them that I. I think it's interesting as a creative person to look back on what did I read when I was writing something. And then you can almost get clues to, you know, why a certain project, you know, appeared. So I remember reading a bunch of biographies about writers who were not writing in their mother tongue. And one of my favorites. I mean, I read about, like. I mean, I read about Conrad and Beckett and I got that Kristoff. But the book that I would love to recommend is Brian Boyd's biography on Nabokov called the American Years. I just love that biography. It's a beautiful biography. He also wrote the Russian Years, but the American Years is just. It was a kind of a companion before, even before I moved here. But I love that biography. If we are talking about. I mean, we talked about Writers who kind of opened my eyes as a young person and me. One of my favorite writers is called Selma La. She was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize on literature. She's an incredible storyteller. One of my favorite books of hers is called the Treasure. In English.

[Chris Holmes]

Okay.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

In Swedish, if there are any Swedes listening. It is a remarkable novel with a subtle feminist theme, dark and gothic.

[Chris Holmes]

When was it written, Jonas?

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I can't tell you the exact year.

[Chris Holmes]

No, no, you don't have to. Just give me a general. General decade.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Maybe 90. Let me check. She got the prize in, I think 1913. Let's see. I actually read it sometimes. I teach it as well. It was written in 1904.

[Chris Holmes]

1904, okay. Yeah.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Oh, wow. Only 54% of Google users like this book. They're wrong.

[Chris Holmes]

They're wrong.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I can tell you. It's. It's a remark. I mean, it's just waiting to be kind of turned into a bloody murder mystery on Netflix. It is one of the things I. One of the reasons why I love it is because. Is she's doing something really from just a creative, practical. It's just like from a craft perspective. It's interesting to see her. She's. She's writing a saga, but she's using some interiority which is, you know, quite rare to do at that time. She almost has like stream of consciousness sections in the book. And it basically it deals with a. A treasure that is being. A family is brutally murdered and treasure is being stolen. And then someone decides to. A young girl decides to get her. Get revenge. It's a beautiful, short, intense novel. I can definitely recommend that. So, Brian Boy, the American Years. Some a Love the treasure. If I could also say, like the book that I have bought and given to people the last year or so has been.

[Chris Holmes]

I always love that.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I mean, I have. I'm waiting for Amazon to ask me if I'm crazy because I keep buying this book and giving it to friends. But I love a book by Dantiel M. Moon. It's called Milk Blood Heat. Contemporary.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah. I've heard of this a lot and people really love it.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yeah, it's a remarkable book. And yeah, that's. That's a definite.

[Chris Holmes]

I did want to ask you if just because of the, you know, the slight similarity of the name the Mykola Sisters and your. Your dropped reference to Tanizaki in the. In the early chapters was the Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki's family epic, a book of importance for you when you were Writing this.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

I love that you asked that question. No one has asked me that question. But it's. When I came to New York, the joke was, you know, I, I had this fancy fellowship where you were supposed to do research and I had already started the book, so I was afraid of force feeding the project with too much research early on. So all the other my research colleagues, they would, you know, they were actual professors and historians and they just ordered a bunch of books and got to working. And my bookshelf in my office was suspiciously empty, but the one book that I had on my shelf was the Makioka Sisters.

[Chris Holmes]

Really?

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Yes. So that's well spotted. And yeah, of course towards the end I, I'm, you know, I, I actually used my, my office and I did a lot of research towards the end, but, but I just didn't want to start with the research.

[Chris Holmes]

That's a book that was profoundly important to me as a, as a young person in college. And so it was, I could, I could feel it a bit in a. And I was very happy to, to find it there. So I'm so glad and I really want to recommend the Sisters. I am, I am not overselling it, I am underselling it in many ways. It's just a book to be transported with. You will not soon forget the Mikola Sisters nor Jonas, both the Jonas in in fiction and non fiction form. And I hope we'll run out to their independent bookstores and purchase a copy. It's just that I really love and I'm, I'm so pleased that I got a chance to speak with you about it. Jonas.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Thank you so much, Chris. This was a real pleasure. Thank you.

[Chris Holmes]

Thank you. Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Jonas Hassan Kamiri for coming on to talk about his brilliant family saga the Sisters, out now with Farrar, Strauss and Drew. You can find links to purchase the Sisters and all of Jonas's recommended books at the website burned by books dot com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by Books.

[Jonas Hassan Kamiri]

Sam.