Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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When I first decided to write my novel, “Their Divine Fires,” I knew I wanted to draw on and honor the stories of my grandmother and mother. In the early 1900s, my grandmother’s uncles joined the Communist Party and fought to protect their country against warlords and Japanese soldiers. Decades later, my mother witnessed the Cultural Revolution and lived through the vast social and political changes that were brought about as a result. I grew up with these stories, stories of resistance and revolution that shaped how I understood who I was and my place in history. Much like the stories on this list, Their Divine Fires explores the ways that collisions in history and the choices of previous generations haunt the lives of the present. My novel follows the love affairs of three generations of women in one family, beginning in early 20th-century China and ending in modern-day America. Each generation must make difficult choices to survive the tumultuous times they live in. The family sagas on this list are all in conversation with my own in some way. Oftentimes, they ask similar questions that I do in my novel: What are the ways that history haunts us? How can we reconcile and make peace with a past that goes beyond our own? How can we move forward while honoring and holding space for our ancestors? The following books answer these questions and more in complicated and heart-wrenching ways. One of China’s “Four Great Classical Novels,” Dream of the Red Chamber is probably considered the Chinese family saga. Written in the 18th century by the poet and scholar Cao Xueqin, the novel follows the rise and fall of the Jia family clan during complex social and political changes of the time. At the center of the novel are a pair of ill-fated star-crossed childhood lovers who are unwillingly pulled into a love triangle. Hailed for its unusually sensitive depiction of the lives of women for its time—an aspect which inspired my novel— Dream of the Red Chamber […]
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The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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