AMY WALDMAN’s
penetrating second novel
speaks truth to power.From the days
following 9/11 until
2005, Amy
Waldman’s work as
a New York Times
correspondent
often took her to
Afghanistan, a country that was both
breathtaking and an “unsolvable
puzzle,” due in part to the “help and the
destruction” the United States had
brought to it. Years later, Afghanistan
remains incomprehensible to many
who follow events there, and it’s into
that darkness that A Door in the Earth
(Little, Brown) attempts to shine some
light. The novel’s heroine, Parveen, is an
idealistic UC Berkeley graduate who
was born in Afghanistan. After reading a
memoir set in an Afghan village,
Parveen ventures to that same village to
volunteer at a maternity clinic
established by an American doctor. But
what she finds isn’t the bustling,
heroic NGO she expects, and her
naïveté soon gives way to a more
nuanced perspective on the
world. O books editor Leigh
Haber wanted to know how
closely Parveen’s experience
mirrors her creator’s, and whether
Waldman, now a wife and mother
in Brooklyn, ever yearns for the
exotic life.
Leigh Haber: Your novel takes
place in a remote Afghan town
that at times seems welcoming,
even cozy, despite the dangers.
Amy Waldman: Yes, I think of
the country as a paradox in that
way, though when I was there, it
was much safer than now. For all
its troubles—the poverty, the
oppression, the violence—there’s
also a stillness, a heightened
sense of the present, and its
mountains and valleys are
shockingly beautiful. All of that
complexity fed into my novel.
LH: You have Parveen, who’s in
her early 20s, traveling solo. She
has no idea what she’s getting into.
You, too, were alone there as a young
woman....
AW: I was, but foreign correspondents,
whether male or female, are rarely
completely on their own, because
they’re dependent on local interpreters
and drivers. In that sense there’s a
certain amount of protection.
LH: Are women particularly vulnerable?
AW: I felt being a woman was very
double-edged in that it often disarmedmen—they didn’t feel as threatened or
think I was a spy, which is often the
assumption for male correspondents.
Women also have the benefit of being
able to talk to other women in Muslim
countries like Afghanistan, which men
can’t do as easily. There weren’t a lot of
times when I felt particularly threatened
as a woman, but there were many times
I did as an American.
LH: You write: “It was amazing...and
sometimes quite useful, how invisiblebeing a woman could make you.”
AW: Yes, and Parveen uses that to her
advantage.
LH: Everywhere she turns, there’s
moral ambiguity. It’s never clear who’s
good, who’s bad. Everyone seems to
exist in gray areas. But Parveen evolves
into a warrior for truth.
AW: For me, fiction is a way to wrestle
with questions for which I don’t have
answers. The more I feel I’m nearing a
wall of uncertainty, the more I want to
put my characters in positions where
the way out isn’t pat, or what seems
like a solution just engenders another
problem.
LH: “It was the one freedom the chadri
bestowed: a woman could look where
she wanted,” you write. Is this a view
you share?
AW: The chadri obscures a woman’s
body and face, except for the netting
over the eyes. The freedom I was
referring to was the ability to look
out from behind that netting at
whomever you want.
LH: Literacy, or the lack of it, is a
major theme. At one point
Waheed, a village patriarch, asks
Parveen to read to his wives, as “it’s
the only way they will ever travel.”
AW: Literacy rates in Afghanistan
are shockingly low, especially for
women, as they are in many
countries I reported in, and so
that was an inevitable part of the
story. In a very conservative area
of Afghanistan, I met a man who
said, “I wish my wife could travel
as you do.” That stuck with me.
LH: Do you consider yourself a
journalist first, or a novelist?
AW: A fiction writer. My career as
a journalist feels like the distant
past, though still important, since
it so informs my fiction.
LH: And now that you have a
family, do you ever feel the
wanderlust that brought Parveen
to Afghanistan?
AW: I had a lot of that restlessness
when I was young, certainly in my early
20s. And I did some impulsive, perhaps
reckless, things. Living abroad and
working as a foreign correspondent
got a lot of that out of my system, as
have growing older and having kids,
who bring constant change and yet
have made me more settled. But I still
get the occasional urge to shake up my
life; I hope I’ll always be invested in the
world beyond the corner or bubble
where I happen to live.LIFTING
THE VEIL
@OPRAHMAGAZINESEPTEMBER (^201987)
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