It's Real, It's Fiction, It's A Paradox: Ayad Akhtar On His 'Homeland Elegies'
The narrator's name in the novel is also Ayad Akhtar, and the book reads like memoir. Akhtar says he had to "pilfer" from his own life to write a novel that had the "addictive thrill" of reality TV.
If you find yourself a little confused by Ayad Akhtar's latest novel, Homeland Elegies, that's by design.
"I wanted to find a form that would express this confusion between fact and fiction which seems to increasingly become the texture of our reality or unreality," he says.
Homeland Elegies is about a family, their ties to their homeland of Pakistan, and the new lives they make for themselves in the U.S. The narrator's name is also Ayad Akhtar, and it reads like memoir ... but it's a novel. Some of the fun lies in trying to tell what's fact and what's fiction.
