PEOPLE LIKE US

THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN - 15 MAY 2014

On our leafy terrace in Lebanon, beside the civil war in Syria, my wife Kelly and I were entertaining an old friend, the new Beirut bureau chief for a major news organization. This woman was moving to town to cover the battle and was scouting houses before she brought her husband and young children. I swirled a large glass of wine, a father myself, and recounted how just a few weeks earlier, a massive, seven-hour shootout had raged just below our balcony, shell-casings bouncing off the asphalt. How I had cowered in our bedroom, checking periodically to ensure our three-year-old daughter was still asleep, listening as thousands of additional rounds of machine gun fire bounced off the walls outside. How Lebanese soldiers arrived in camouflaged armored personnel carriers, and how seven or eight grenades exploded when the bad guys down the block determined that they would fight to the death. How, instead of cowering beside me, my wife Kelly had put down her wine glass, grabbed a notebook and a flak jacket, and walked off into the night.

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Nathan Deuel: The TNB Self-Interview

THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN - 15 MAY 2014

Was it really that bad?

Fuck off.

Y’know, being a dad…wife in the war, Middle East, etc.

It was a fairly constant struggle for me: The fact that it wasn’t that bad at all. In fact, many times—a lot of the time—it was quite excellent. I can’t really adequately describe what it’s like to get rip-roaring drunk by yourself, as the bats fly overhead, wife in Baghdad, with the sound of the call to prayer ringing out over Istanbul, the moon coming up, and you light an illicit cigarette and the hum of the earth is loud and…A grilled fish lunch at an old cantina in a secluded cove north of Beirut, with the table literally in the water, catching up with an old friend from Riyadh, the waves licking up over the table cloth, sea froth kissing the food with salt water, cold bottles of beer…Or to have Christmas in Erbil, in northern Iraq, the odd situation of your wife agreeing to watch the kid while you put on a suit that doesn’t quite fit, so you can get in a taxi and try to track down Christians who fled Baghdad, in the wake of a bombing at a church that killed dozens, to find a woman who will speak to you, in the middle of the street, on Christmas day, with the taxi idling, getting a good enough quote to go back to the house, so you can file a story, so you can sing “Jingle Bells” and squint in the su

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WITHOUT CHIEF OR TRIBE: AN EXCERPT FROM 'FRIDAY WAS THE BOMB'

VICE - 13 MAY 2014

I was having lunch at the swan near Hyde Park and some son of a bitch took my bag with all my documents, the email began. It was June of 2009 and I was sitting at a desk in Riyadh. Assuming this was spam, I was about to press delete, when something made me reconsider.

Outside, it was summer in Saudi Arabia, where temperatures could exceed one hundred and thirty degrees. My wife Kelly and I had lived in the country for nearly a year. We’d spent much of our lives in foreign countries or in strange corners of North America. We’d met in Cambodia, spent years in Southeast Asia, got to know Russia and the former Soviet Union, and I proposed to her on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska. This time, however, the Middle East in general seemed a little beyond my talent set. Maybe it was the heat making me feel weak? By this time of year everyone was spending entire days indoors, emerging only to drive air-conditioned cars, in which metal could be so hot it might burn your skin. Streets buckled, the wind howled in from the desert, and meanwhile booze was still illegal, women were forbidden from consorting with men they weren’t related to, and it was hard to imagine why anyone would ever choose to settle here. Considering all this, we—the swashbuckling couple who had never shied away from doing something insane—were about to bring a new baby into the world.

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Nathan Deuel on 'Friday was the Bomb,' his Middle East memoir

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - 12 MAY 2014

BY JASMINE ELIST

Over the last decade, hundreds of war memoirs have been written by soldiers and journalists who have experienced the war in the Middle East from the front lines. However, in “Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East” (Dzanc, $14.95 paper), Nathan Deuel recounts his time in the Middle East between 2008 and 2013 from a different angle: the sidelines.

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FRIDAY WAS THE BOMB: AN INTERVIEW WITH ESSAYIST, JOURNALIST AND DEBUT NONFICTION WRITER NATHAN DEUEL

THE WRITER'S JOB - 7 MAY 2014

The product of several years’ worth of hard living in the Middle East, Nathan Deuel’s debut collection of essays, Friday Was the Bomb, was just published this week from Disquiet, a division of indie powerhouse Dzanc. Deuel’s essays have been appearing all over the web and in print media for years (New York Times Magazine, Harper's, GQ, The New York Times, The New Republic, Financial Times, The Paris Review). I spoke to him about the circumstances in which he wrote and lived the stories in this book, and the collection’s charmed (but deserved!) path to publication.

Jake Zucker: I think the most ominous single line in the collection is from the first chapter/essay: “In the beginning, Iraq had seemed like the center of the universe.” Was it always the center of your writing universe? You write about your experience editing content about the War in Iraq, but was it inevitable that you’d personally write about it too, in some way?

Nathan Deuel: 9/11 completely defined my life as an adult. Prior to that, there was this ambient hunger for the kind of urgency and import that a previous generation had because of Vietnam, and World War II before that, and the Depression before that, etc. (The Civil Rights Movement is and was also very worthy but was more of a domestic cause to rally around.) With 9/11, my generation very quickly was handed an organizing principle, whether we liked it or not.

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THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH NATHAN DEUEL

THE RUMPUS - 6 MAY 2014

Nathan Deuel isn’t breaking big stories in Friday Was the Bomb, his debut essay collection about the five years he spent in the Middle East. He’s not investigating global problems or charting the aftermath of conflict. Instead, he writes about access and everyday life, and how we make lives for ourselves when we must rationalize our roles in places we don’t fully understand or belong.

Deuel moved to Saudi Arabia in 2008 with his wife, Kelly McEvers, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent. Their daughter was born in Riyadh a year later, and as McEvers began spending long stretches of time in Baghdad and other areas of Iraq, Deuel found himself grappling with his new role as father in Riyadh, and later in Beirut.

We spoke recently about the complications of work and family far from home, literature’s contemporary representations of the Middle East, and how essays function in singular and collective forms.

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The Rumpus: In the essay “Homeland in My Homeland,” you write about the popular Showtime program Homeland and its rendering of Beirut, where you were living at the time. Can you talk more about popular culture representations of conflicts in the Middle East? Do you think they’re being represented fairly, by news and entertainment outlets?

Nathan Deuel: Gosh, who does a good job representing the far away? Living in Jakarta back in the day, with my wife Kelly, we lived in the slums in the master bedroom of a house owned by an Islamic scholar, which he maintained for his second wife. It was a weird scene. We cooked over a stove in an alley, sharing a communal thing of rice with the wife and her sister, stored in a glass jar in which mice cavorted. The second wife, displaced by us when we began renting that room, would emerge early each morning from her slightly smaller bedroom, and she’d begin these long mournful karaoke covers of Air Supply. We’d hardly slept, because a train ran at all hours a few feet from our bedroom and beside the tracks was an open-air brothel. To get around the city, I mostly walked, sticking to footpaths along the muddy rivers—a city where you either had $300 million or $300. We had the latter. It was always so bittersweet, when I’d arrived at the luxury mall, spending dollars we didn’t really have on cheese and beer, and it was hard to square all I’d seen and was living with and where I had come from and what I hoped one day to accomplish against that outdoor brothel, the forest of trees beside the river where prostitutes would tack up hand mirrors to the bark, which served as their little make-up stations, tiny combs and brushes stuffed into the crooks of trees.

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Bombs Over Sad Dad: IMing with Nathan Deuel

AMAZON.COM/OMNIVORACIOUS - 5 MAY 2014

If parenting is the hardest job in the world, imagine doing it in a place of civil unrest. Nathan Deuel's book, Friday Was the Bomb, spans the five years he and his daughter Loretta spent in Turkey and Lebanon as Deuel's wife, an NPR foreign correspondent, reported from Baghdad and Syria. As much asFriday is about living in the Middle East, it's also a moving autobiographical tale of isolation and fatherhood. Here, Deuel has penned a book about fragility with the robustness of an empathetic essayist and the careful eye of a seasoned journalist.

I spoke with Deuel over Gchat about his time abroad, raising his daughter Loretta, the wonders of the internet, and the show Homeland.

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Kevin Nguyen: Nathan, what's your book about? Can you describe it in IMs?

Nathan Deuel: It's about moving to the Middle East in 2008 with my wife, who was a stringer for NPR. We scored visas to Saudi Arabia, one of the least understood and most mysterious countries in the world. We struggled to make a life there and to understand it and to make friends, and then we had a baby there, too.

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6 Books That Helped Nathan Deuel Make Sense of War and Exile

FLAVORWIRE - 15 MAY 2014

BY JASON DIAMOND

Since he does a much better job explaining it than we would, we’ll just preface his piece by saying that Nathan Deuel’s Friday Was the Bomb is one of the most fascinating accounts we’ve read of an American in the Middle East during the last tumultuous decade. During his time abroad, Deuel not only wrote about his experiences, but also did a lot of reading. Below, the author tells us, in his own words, about the books that helped him make meaning out of his years of exile.

In December 2011, I moved to Beirut with my wife — a foreign correspondent — and our two year-old daughter. We were coming off a few hard years, first in Riyadh, the fearsome capital of Saudi Arabia, where we’d dodged the religious police and had a little girl. Then Kelly got a job in Iraq, so I moved with our diaper-clad daughter to Istanbul. Spend a few days in Turkey’s capital and I admit, it will blow your mind. Move there in the wake of your dad’s abrupt death from cancer, with your daughter — while your wife dodges mortars in Baghdad — and you might find yourself, as I did, smothered as much by the demands of fatherhood as by an impenetrable language, a society trending toward the darker sides of nationalism, and a flood of new money.

So after three years, when we got the go-ahead to move to beautiful, broken Beirut — with its beaches and wine and convivial crew of fellow correspondents, many of whom had children — it felt like everything was coming together. We rented an airy, light-filled apartment, bought a bunch of plants, and thought about hosting a party. But the uprising in neighboring Syria was turning into all-out war.

Kelly worked long hours and we did our best but as friends or colleagues died and a car bomb exploded and then a seven-hour shoot-out rocked and rolled right outside our bedroom windows, I began to lose focus. What was the point? How to be a parent beside this? A husband? What about the fact we were Americans?

Seeking guidance, or at least the half-shine of potential answers, I turned to books. From Graham Greene to Shiva Naipaul, from Leigh Newman to Nick Flynn, I found various blueprints for how to think about the horror around me and how to turn a time of often indescribable cruelty into something meaningful — or at least semi-comprehensible.

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In Defense of National Airlines

ROADS & KINGDOMS - 23 APRIL 2014

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370: How can 239 people just disappear? I fantasize about the plane itself: What it looked like, the color of the seats, the food. Will I ever fly on Malaysian Airlines? Will anyone ever want to again?

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A Life in Our Hands: Community, Crime, and Punishment - On Jesse Ball's 'Silence Once Begun'

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS - 22 MARCH 2014

IN AND AROUND the Japanese fishing village of Sakai, in Osaka prefecture, a community’s elderly citizens are disappearing without a trace. Years later, after the community has tried and jailed (and worse) a man who confessed to the apparent crimes, a journalist named Jesse Ball sets out to write a book about what actually happened.

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Let’s Go Ride a Bike

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE - 28 FEBRUARY 2014

Last fall, I moved from Beirut to Los Angeles with my wife, Kelly, a journalist, and our 4-year-old daughter, Loretta, who one evening was ready to get back on her bike.

The sidewalk stretched out before us. We could hear the steady pulse of traffic on Lincoln and Venice Boulevards. The timing seemed perfect: just before dinner, no chill in the air — a moment to show Loretta how to enjoy her new life in America. Look, honey, you’re safe now!

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Ye Who Enter, Abandon Hope: Hell Is a Hospital in Lore Segal's "Half the Kingdom"

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS - 12 FEBRUARY 2014

WE’LL ALL SOME DAY be crooked and shrunken, bent before the mercy of the medical system. Into a hospital, each of us will bring our own pains, weaknesses, history, and fate. The ER doesn't care how we measure beauty. We get a chart. There are certain hours we can be visited, and certain things we can expect from the people who are supposed to care.

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Anthony Is Dead

GAWKER - 18 JANUARY 2014

It was one of the first warm evenings of spring when my new neighbor Steve—leaning over his balcony and through the bougainvillea—suggested we should take the kids to Faraya, a ski town a few hours from what was starting to look like a war in Syria.

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Even More Recent History

AMERICAN CIRCUS - 18 DECEMBER 2013

1.

Choire Sicha was one of the first editors at spit-balling rabble-rouser Gawker, and he later logged time at the genteel but influential New York Observer when that pink broadsheet was an incubator for talent now found across publishing's various august mastheads. In more recent years, he's made a new name as founder of The Awl, a curious but widely admired online magazine. Such is his and The Awl's influence, however, that when the editor of The New York Times Magazine stepped down one morning this November, it was Sicha who by 9 a.m. had assembled a list of suggested replacements, including novelist Renata Adler and Times India correspondent Ellen Barry. Unspoken but acknowledged, as media watchers admiringly linked to Sicha's list: some day, perhaps if a smart move was made by leadership, the new editor could be Sicha himself.

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LA Story

THE PARIS REVIEW - 18 DECEMBER 2013

I have just moved to Los Angeles from the Middle East, and everyone keeps asking me if the city is too quiet—Am I bored? Is it safe?—and the answer is, No, I am not bored; yes, it seems safe, and yes, that’s fine by me. Mostly I am in a state of awe, blown away by a grocery store, the knock of the mailman at the door, the speed of the Internet; the easy friends you can make on the sidewalk or on the bus or while watching your kids play soccer or walking down Venice Boulevard, waiting for a light to change, en route to the University of Southern California, where I found myself the other day, seeking out the next thing I might do with my life, right before things went wrong again.

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Reality Strikes: Mark Haskell Smith's "Raw"

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS - 11 DECEMBER 2013

SEPP GREGORY HAS GREAT ABS. He was a beach volleyball player, then a player on a reality TV show, and then has his heart was broken by a bronzed co-star named Roxy, whose diet required lots of tequila and sex. During a follow-up TV series, shown around the country, Sepp recovered and fell for a doctor, but she, too, broke his heart. Now he's on tour for his autobiography,Total Reality. Adoring fans, mostly women, form lines at bookstores in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. They want to see rippling stomach muscles. Some offer sex. But he can't get it up. And there's another problem. Sepp didn't write the book. (And someone's going to die.)

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A Former Soviet Union: Elliott Holt's "You Are One of Them"

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS - 7 OCTOBER 2013

IT'S THE SEASON of the expatriate. Caleb Crain's Necessary Errors concerns the city of Prague, and Elliot Holt's fast, electrifying debut, You Are One of Them, takes us to Russia. Her book is as convincing and absorbing a portrait of post-Soviet Russia as you'll read. But at its heart, it's also about America.

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Daniel Alarcón's Haunting Political Fiction

THE NEW REPUBLIC - 9 NOVEMBER 2013

The Peruvian-born novelist Daniel Alarcón has become one of the most important modern voices for the countries south of the border. His first major book was the ambitious novel Lost City Radio (2007), a haunting tale set in an unnamed South or Central American country, where a talk show host uses on-air time to broadcast the names of those who have mysteriously “disappeared.” But that first novel had the airless precision of an experiment. Something about the life and trials of its characters felt brittle and incomplete, the anonymity of its setting eerily cold. It was torn between being a keen sketch of political turmoil and a broad historical fable.

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Beached

THE PARIS REVIEW - 24 OCTOBER 2013

There is something brutal about Phillip Glass’s opera. The way it stops and starts, the taunting tease of a story, then the way it’s anything but narrative. Composed of nine twenty-minute scenes, the whole of Einstein on the Beach—first produced in 1976 and shown in L.A. for the first time this month—is interspersed by five so-called “knee plays,” in which two women sit or stand or writhe around on plastic platforms, or search dreamily inside gently moving glass boxes. It’s not easy to watch.

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Bones

THE PARIS REVIEW - 9 OCTOBER 2013

You discover one day—while everyone else is doing whatever it is that makes them happy—that you can almost pop one of the bones in your hand right out of the skin. It’s awesome. First, you practice in secret, when you’re bored or exasperated by school. But one day, you are practicing out in the open when someone notices the little bit of white sticking out, and they say, Wow, how cool, and they ask you to do it again. Look at this guy, they say—when formerly you were ignored or marginalized or made to feel you were odd or would at any rate never to amount to much—and it occurs to you: maybe you’re on to something.

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