Interview with Anne Marie Ruff – author of Beneath the Same Heaven

21st July 2018

We recently published our review of the excellent Beneath the Same Heaven by Anne Marie Ruff. Now we are very pleased to be able to bring you an interview with Anne Marie in which she talks about her life and the motivation for writing the book.

TF: Beneath the Same Heaven is a quite daring book in the subject matters that it covers. How did the idea for the book come to you, and how did it develop?

AMR: On 9/11, I was in a nightclub in Bangkok, dancing with a man from another culture and another religion, a Sikh man from India. When the lights came up and the TV screens in the club showed the smoking towers, we both knew revenge would follow. After he and I married, we realized that we had grown up with different ideas of justice and how to achieve it. So this story was my attempt to look at a worst case scenario. I explored what happens to love when two seemingly irreconcilable systems of justice collide in a situation beyond either person’s control. Beneath the Same Heaven – a story of love and terrorism is my attempt to answer the questions: what drives good and loving people to act in reprehensible ways? And can those people remain good and loving?

TF:  You said you feared writing the book might brand you as a terrorist sympathiser. And Rashid is in many ways a sympathetic character. Has that fear in any way come to pass? Or have you been pleasantly surprised by readers’ reactions?

AMR: When Martin Scorsese made the film, The Last Temptation of Christ, some Christians protested, maligned him for telling an anti-Christian story. But the film beautifully explores what Jesus would have experienced, and offered profound insight into his struggles, his love, and his sacrifice.

Similarly (how thrilled I would be if I could claim some similarity with Scorsese or The Last Temptation of Christ!) I imagined (and my publisher warned me) I might face some backlash for portraying a terrorist sympathetically in Beneath the Same Heaven.

During the years I lived in Abu Dhabi and travelled in the Middle East, I came to love Arabic people, Muslim people. Before the second invasion of Iraq, I watched military convoys head north on the freeways. People I knew in America asked me questions as if I was living with the enemy. They didn’t see Arabs or Muslims the way I did. At the same time, I was trying to understand how young Muslims could blow themselves up in terrorist attacks.

I have a dear friend in America whose brother was killed in the 9/11 attacks. With some apprehension, I explained to him over the years the story I was trying to tell in this book. He understood and encouraged me along the way. He gave me a barometer, a measure by which I could gauge the pressure of the story I was telling.

I marvel that readers have perceived the characters in the ways in which I wanted to present them. Readers have told me: “During the first half of the book, I was sure Rashid was in the wrong. By the end of the book I couldn’t make up my mind”; “I realized that ‘they’ are just like ‘us’”; and “I had never thought about terrorism from this perspective.” I am so grateful that the story has caused readers to ask questions, to re-examine their own assumptions about right and wrong, and maybe allow the possibility that other cultures and other countries might have their own reasons for pursuing violence.

To me, one of the greatest values of travel is the ability to share a bit of what we have learned in our journeys, with others who haven’t had the opportunity to go to the same places or meet the same people.

TF: You have travelled the world fairly extensively. And, as you know, location is very important to TripFiction. I appreciate you lived in Abu Dhabi (and presumably visited Dubai) and Los Angeles. But have you in fact ever been to Lahore or to the tribal lands of Pakistan up by the Afghan border. If not, how did you research the area and make it so believable in the book?

AMR: I have never been to Pakistan or the Afghan border. But I took inspiration from Barbara Kingsolver, who had never been to the Congo and wrote The Poisonwood Bible with the authority of one who had spent years there. So I used nearly every experience and resource available to me to portray Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and the frontier territories. Geographically and culturally, Pakistan is between Abu Dhabi, where I lived for three years, and India, where I travelled often. I reflected on those countries, as well my travels in Turkmenistan, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Ethiopia to write about Pakistan. I styled men in the frontier territories on the taxi drivers in Abu Dhabi (most of whom are Pashtuns from Peshawar), and the Afghan baker from whom I regularly bought bread in an Abu Dhabi storefront. I described the Pakistani food from the delicious meals I ate at Al-Ibrahimi’s Pakistani restaurant in Abu Dhabi. The Pashtun village and house and hospitality reflects homes I visited in Oman and Turkmenistan and even Ethiopia.

I also tried to draw on all my senses. When I felt I couldn’t see my setting, I used the internet. I looked up maps and train schedules, videos of bombings, and drones. Google image searches as well as Google earth and maps gave me a very clear feel of the places I was writing about. I pulled sounds from a concert I attended in Los Angeles of an Afghan rubab player. I felt firsthand the power of the music, and then I spent hours listening to the CDs I bought after the concert. I smelled the Arabic perfumes and oud incense I brought back from Abu Dhabi. And of course there are books and movies: The Kiterunner, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty. We actually have a lot of exposure to Pakistan and Afghanistan in popular culture.

TF: Similarly, your knowledge of Muslim conventions and customs. How did you research these?

AMR: After living in Abu Dhabi for three years, I had a fairly visceral feeling of Muslim customs. I made a point of meeting people from other countries. Since the UAE is one of the most cosmopolitan countries I have ever been in, I had friends from all over the Muslim world: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Kuwait. And as a former journalist I have a habit of being curious, asking questions, and noticing details.

And again, if I felt I didn’t know enough, I turned to research. The internet is an amazing resource. I was able to look up translations of the Koran, diagrams of the sequence of prayer postures, and such to verify what I had observed in Abu Dhabi and India. Really, any literate person with access to the internet can study the whole world by asking questions and taking the time to look at the answers?

TF: You returned to Minnesota after many years away from the State. What, in particular, made you want to come ‘home’?

AMR: I have traveled and lived around the world. And now — 27 years after I first left Minnesota — I am less than a mile from where I grew up, living surrounded by an extraordinarily beautiful forest. I decided to come back for love — for my mother, and for our children. I wanted them to know each other better, I wanted to be here in case my mother needed me and so my kids could attend good public schools. I have been fascinated to realize that I see this familiar place with completely different eyes, an explorer’s perspective. And that has revealed an astonishingly fresh and beautiful place.

TF: Authors work in many different ways – a subject we find consistently fascinating. Did you plan Beneath the Same Heaven in great detail before you started writing – or did you let the characters and the plot develop as you wrote?

AMR: I spent a couple of years letting book ideas percolate. I knew I wanted to draw on my cross-cultural experience, and my travels. I started with a memoir, but that quickly turned boring and narcissistic. I thought about writing about a Sikh separatist, but wanted something more mainstream that would trigger our collective passions. About a decade ago, I spent a lot of time driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco with my husband and sons to visit my sister-in-law. Because we drove at night so the babies would sleep, I spent long hours driving the 5 freeway in the dark, thinking about the premise of this story. Then my husband and I spent lots of evenings over the course of about six months talking through the plot. After I had drafted the plot outline of the book, I wrote the whole first draft in about 16 months (I had aimed for a year, but hadn’t factored in holidays and sick days). I spent several years revising the book and working with a brilliant literary agent. Then after 14 rejections from some of the biggest publishers in London and New York, I spent a couple of years letting the manuscript collect dust. Last fall, at the suggestion of good friend who is a writer, I sent the manuscript directly to a publisher who accepted the book. I then spent another several months revising the language, trimming scenes, and redrafting a bit. All told the book took about eight years from inception to publication.

TF: Similarly, how disciplined are you in your writing? Do you write at the same time each day, do you set yourself word count targets for the day, or do you write as and when you feel the words will flow?

I think discipline is essential. Inspiration comes to all of us all the time. We have ideas in the shower or on a run, or while we are doing the dishes. I think the harder part is finding the discipline to write down our ideas, to follow through to the end of the idea and then share it with others. And maybe even harder than that is handling the inevitable rejection that comes, without giving up on the process entirely.

I wrote most of this book on the bus on the way to my office job when I lived in Los Angeles. I set a goal of 250 words every morning on my 20 minute bus ride. (I discovered I couldn’t write on the evening commute, as my brain was tired). And I wrote 1000 words on one weekend morning.

This schedule evolved from years of frustration about how I didn’t have time to write because I had a full-time job and two children and a full social life. Before I figured out the right schedule, I was pretty sure my husband was to blame for my lack of time. But I realized all the other tasks in my life were getting done, so the time for writing was just a matter of prioritizing. I had been trying to write at the end of the day, when I was exhausted, and often I would lose the few precious minutes I had around midnight because my old computer would crash. So I asked my husband, who is a brilliant Craigslist shopper, to find me a tiny computer that I could carry with me to take advantage of any down time I had. It need not be fast or fancy, just a good wordprocessor. I also bargained with my family, that if they allowed me an hour or two on a Saturday to write 1000 words, I would give them my focus for the rest of the weekend. I really think figuring out the time and place for writing is one of the most important issues in a writer’s life. Ideas come to all of us. Taking the time to write them down is hard.

TF: Can you as yet tell us the subject matter of your next book? Or is it still a secret?

I am revising a first draft of a children’s/young adult book I am calling Worldmaker, about kids from around the world who meet through an online video game, and realize they have will have to combine their own unique abilities to respond to climate change.

And in an unexpected development, I find that my daily morning walk in the woods inspires me. In the last year, I have developed a passion for photographing the wonders that I see in the woods. I take great pleasure in sharing my view of the woods (especially the tiny plants and animals that we often overlook) on my Instagram feed (@homesteadgrewallove). Perhaps another book might develop from those images.

A big thank you to Anne Marie for her very thoughtful and insightful answers!

Tony for the TripFiction team

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