How did you become a writer? I grew up in a household of books. My father read every book that dealt with the history he had lived through himself, the Second World War, Stalin and McCarthyism, Kennedy and Vietnam, Watergate and the Contras. My mother ran a great books reading circle that ploughed through about two hundred books in a cycle of 10 years, and then repeated. I traveled to Afghanistan in 1975 without a camera. When I returned home, I shut myself in my room with an Olivetti portable typewriter and turned out two hundred pages without stopping to eat.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Since I started out writing a travel book I took inspiration from Bruce Chatwin and Patrick Leigh-Fermour. Also, in French, Nicholas Bouvier, and older writers like Peter Fleming and Robert Byron.

When and where do you write? I write at home on the dining room table or on a large card table in the living room, with plenty of sunshine and a little bit of noise distracting from the street. I try to use a big screen to soothe my eyes. I sit down at 9:30 in the morning, and often don’t get up from the table until 4:00 in the afternoon, when I need a walk to regain the use of my legs. 

What are you working on now? I have three projects under investigation: a history of the geographic idea of Europe and how different the frontiers of Europe are today compared to the past; a more comprehensive version of my 2019 essay on woman entertainers in Asia;  a fiction project about a famous 19th century stage actress and her circle of intellectual male admirers—this latter project in collaboration with my new muse.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Most of the time I have an idea which is eating me up leaves me itching to set something down on paper, often ten at a time.  That inevitably means the structure is weak, the prose flabby, the main point lost in the telling. Now the blockage that needs to be overcome, is to tinker, to rewrite, to throw out (see below), to start over. It can take weeks or months before the text looks like something I would want to read myself.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Bruce Chatwin advised me to put my first typescript in the drawer and move on. I didn’t take his advice. My brother, a gifted drafter of legal briefs, made a less dramatic suggestion. “Sleep on it.” The mind works while we are not paying attention. An unsolvable structural or phrasing problem can disappear with a good night’s sleep. This is obviously of no use if one has a deadline, but good writing cannot be forced.

What’s your advice to new writers? Read a lot and identify what it is you like about the books you enjoy. Read books written a hundred years ago, so you have more diverse models.  I spent a certain amount of time trying to parody Henry James, mostly to get it out of my system. This made me aware of all the different styles and voices that one can deploy, until you naturally develop your own.

Bio: I was born in Chicago into a family of readers. I studied Middle Eastern languages at Harvard, which helped me start my career as a traveler and writer in Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey. The political turmoil of the early ’80s stymied these ambitions, and that despite my marrying the greatest Arabist of her generation. The need to earn a living, and then to raise children in a stable environment led us to spend 30 years in Paris working respectively in computers and banking. This enabled us to spend extensive periods of time in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and China. As soon as I retired in 2018, I wrote Three Asian Divas, and in 2020 started working on Raiders, Rulers and Traders. My companion on all these journeys did not live to see the publication of this book that she had so patiently helped revise.