It’s About Joy: The Millions Interviews Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine does not write novels about easy topics, but I think that every book of his has made me laugh. At its heart, The Wrong End of the Telescope is about Mina, a Lebanese-American doctor working with refugees in Lesbos—and specifically her relationship with a woman named Samaiya, who’s dying of cancer. That’s not really what the book is about, though. It’s about Mina’s distance from her family when she moved to America and came out as transgender and lesbian, about the relationship that she’s forged with her brother. It’s about Mina’s relationship with her wife. How Sumaiya is preparing her family for life after she dies. The stories of the Syrian refugees who have fled to Lesbos. Stories that might force some readers to rethink queer identity.

A book about so many people fleeing violence and facing an uncertain and uneasy future could easily become despairing, but as in all of his work, Alameddine is driven by a righteous anger. That means refusing to make easy choices, and instead to face trauma, but to also find joy and find hope and fight for that. In life. In art. In Mina, Alameddine has crafted a character who is many things, who has lost so much, but who does not despair and tries to be of use and finds joy. Even if fleeting, her openness to possibility is a wonder. This is a novel about trauma and death, but it is also a novel about possibility and change. And hope.

“Even if there’s no hope—there is hope,” Alameddine said at one point in our conversation. This is perhaps as good a summation of his philosophy as a writer, and perhaps as a person. The Wrong is possibly his greatest work to date, and he was kind enough to talk with me about the long effort to write about this topic, where the character of Mina came from, and how we see and read people.