The Story of Us All: A Guest Post by Naeem Murr

A poignant portrait of a man’s journey through life and love in a tumultuous world from the author of The Perfect Man. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Naeem Murr on writing Every Exit Brings You Home.

During a break from writing a historical novel based on the lives of my paternal family, I took a walk in my Chicago neighborhood one afternoon and noticed a man and woman sitting in an old Chevy Impala hitched to a U-Haul trailer outside my condominium building. A child lay asleep in the back seat. Though the couple were leaning tenderly against each other, they looked bereft—alone. It felt like the moment after the Biblical Fall. This prompted the idea for a short story about a Gazan immigrant to Chicago, Jamal (Jack) Shaban, the story catalyzed by a troubled and aggressive single mother, Marcia, moving into Jack’s condominium.

This story quickly became Every Exit Brings You Home. To say the novel wrote itself, of course, wouldn’t be entirely accurate, since it required research and painstaking work, but it felt ready to be in the world, as if this story—these characters—had been gestating in me for years. Jack was my collaborator, not my creation, instantly looking back at me across the page, slowly revealing his traumatic history in Gaza. I discovered in Jack someone unable to cohere as a person, becoming a flight attendant for the illusion of eternal escape, creating alternate selves at work and home, lying to everyone. Jack wasn’t single, as I’d first assumed, but married to another Gazan, Dimra, with secrets of her own. Birdy soon appeared, Jack’s innocent and attractive colleague, embodying Jack’s longing for a future free from suffering. Enter Gunther, Jack’s neighbor, who “borrows” items from the Field Museum where he works, these artifacts becoming a part of the novel’s idiomatic language. Other immigrants quickly occupied Jack’s condo building, like May, an irascible Vietnamese refugee, struggling to keep her drug-addicted son from going to jail. And, of course, there’s Marcia, evoking for Jack the taboo affair in Gaza that nearly cost him his life.

Only after the book was finished could I look at it more objectively, becoming aware of the condo building as a microcosm of larger struggles for people to share the same space. I could also see how much in the novel refracted my own experiences, particularly key intimacies with members of my father’s family, some of whom urged me to look only forward, while others insisted I never forget the past. This is the primary tension in the novel. Dimra is Palestinian to the bone, obsessed with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, unable to translate herself into an American life, barely able to leave their apartment, while Jack embodies the struggle to escape a past too full of love to cauterize, too full of pain to assimilate. Ultimately, they invest all their hope in the child Dimra is pregnant with, a child whom they believe will carry them into an American future.

For every one of us, our past provides the emotional response to and categorization of each new person or experience we encounter. Like Jack and Dimra, we all have to negotiate a way to our futures through our pasts. Their story, at its deepest level, is the story of us all.