Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been obsessed with family stories. Growing up in New York, I’d sit with older relatives originally from Iraq, Argentina, and Syria who told them to me in a spellbinding mix of languages. By now you all know this, but it bears repeating: Those tall tales are what inspired me to want to become a writer, and in the past few years I’ve been so lucky to tell stories of our beautiful world in all of its forms.
My writing about people and places ties together the cultures and the continents that make me who I am, the product of a family that has long wandered the world, looking for a sense of belonging and home. “Home” can mean different things to different people: it can be a town or a country or a language or a song. To me, home is where the stories sound familiar.
I was very excited when they asked me to narrate the audiobook version of Stranger in the Desert, in which I turn back to those family stories that started it all. These past few months, sharing the hardcover at events and readings across the U.S. and online, I’ve been reminded of the power of telling stories the way they were first told to me (and the way stories are first told to any child in the world): out loud.
Hearing stories aloud holds our attention in a way that reading might not. “I want you to understand every word,” says my grandmother, Abuela, whenever she reads me one of her short stories. Sometimes, as stories are passed down through the generations, it can feel like a game of telephone — hard to deduce what’s true and what’s been slightly altered over time — but with family history, I think, what matters most is that the stories are still being told at all.
This book especially lends itself to being heard, because there are words and accents and names that, as in real life, carry so much more meaning when they are spoken by the storyteller (you’ll also hear me speak some Spanish with that weird hybrid Argentine-American accent I described in my last note). Imagine that we’re sitting around a campfire, trading legends, and it’s my turn — my turn to tell you about the time I found an old binder in my grandfather’s basement that set me off on a journey to South America in search of those stories that sounded familiar. Along the way, I met shepherds and folk singers and traveling salesmen, and found clues to a family mystery that no one, until now, seemed to understand.
Stranger in the Desert is available now on Audible and wherever else you get your audiobooks. Listen to the exclusive preview above, and the whole thing here:
https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Stranger-Desert-Family-Story/dp/B0D362BZG7/
Also, I loved reading your letters back about language. Now, tell me about the stories/fairytales/family legends you heard as kids!
All my best,
Jordan -
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