It is worth pointing out that Laila Halaby, besides her two novels that have been discussed in this interview, has other published works and forthcoming literary projects. My Name on His Tongue (2012), for instance, is a collection of poems that shed light on women who grew up and lived in the United States as Arabs and Americans. The literary output in the making is Woman, Be My Country, a novel in which three unlikely characters -Filasteen Salama, Shah Reza D, and William Wallace -interact over coffee as a result of war, and their names, which represent a heavy burden to carry, have had a profound effect on their choices. Watching the Girl You Love Walk Away with Charlie Manson demonstrates a year of grief in 12 stories that take place in the year after Trump's election. Also, The Weight of Ghosts is a memoir under consideration for publication.Ishak Berrebbah (IB): You have contributed remarkably to the contemporary Arab American literary canon, given that your fiction has been acknowledged positively by many literary critics such as Steven Salaita (2011) and Amal Talaat Abdelrazak (2008). Is there a link between your fiction and your life in any aspect? In other words, do your life experiences have an impact on the shaping of your fiction?Laila Halaby (LH): I think just my existence shaped it, the fact that I was always between, so I think that was what drove me to fiction in the first place, the fact that I never really felt this Arab Americanness has its own culture. I had that American mom and a Jordanian father and it was not a cohesive blending. I think to make sense of that I wrote stories and I think that's where it came from. I think the various stories that developed often come from the things that I see and I want to work through, and I want to understand better. You know it is not so much that I am "Neither here nor there": A Conversation with Laila Halaby Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 43.2 | 2021 IB: I mean throughout the novel there are some male characters who perpetuate patriarchy such as Hala's father, Khadija's father, and also Soraya's father to some extent. Talking about Khadija's father in particular, he shows a strong male dominance within the family "Neither here nor there": A Conversation with Laila Halaby Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 43.2 | 2021
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