INTERVIEW: ‘The act of writing provided a sense of control when my body offered none’
Hanif Kureishi You have been back in your London home for several months now, after a year in different hospitals,
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The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to avoid calls from collection agencies. Did you want to write a story about debt? Yes, that was definitely the starting point. It’s a compelling predicament to have a character embroiled in debt, with its automatic urgency and its built-in stakes, and there seems to be a universality to debt—or at least the fear of it. The question for the reader would immediately be whether or not the narrator will be able to dig himself out of the hole that he’s in. (I wanted the questions of how he has arrived at this place—and more importantly, why —to arise later for the reader.) But I have also been wanting to write a story about indoctrination and groupthink, and what might cause a person to conform. Happily, I was able to combine those two ideas here. There was an early draft of “Minimum Payment Due” where I introduced the idea of the cult in the very first line. In effect, I was giving away something that, in later drafts, would become gradually more clear only as the story drew closer to the end. At the last minute, I decided to open with the phone ringing because (a) it seemed like a much more propulsive way to begin, and (b) I wanted the reader to wonder if what the narrator is becoming involved in is, in fact, a cult. In other words, I decided not to be definitive. In the final draft, the debt is introduced in the first line, and the prospect of the cult begins a few paragraphs later when the narrator is on the phone with Reggie, although it’s oblique, and the narrator—and the reader—will not fully realize this when it appears. As the story progresses, the two threads converge until they’re entwined in the final moment when the narrator is faced with a decision that, on the face of it, appears contradictory: his debt will be resolved if he agrees to sign up for Step One and spend […]
Click here to view original page at Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
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Hanif Kureishi You have been back in your London home for several months now, after a year in different hospitals,
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