A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [144]
Very special thanks to my father, Baba, for reading this manuscript, for his feedback, and, as ever, for his love and support. And to my mother, whose selfless, gentle spirit permeates this tale. You are my reason, Mother jo. My thanks go to my in-laws for their generosity and many kindnesses. To the rest of my wonderful family, I remain indebted and grateful to each and every one of you.
I wish to thank my agent, Elaine Koster, for always, always believing, Jody Hotchkiss (Onward!), David Grossman, Helen Heller, and the tireless Chandler Crawford. I am grateful and indebted to every single person at Riverhead Books. In particular, I want to thank Susan Petersen Kennedy and Geoffrey Kloske for their faith in this story. My heartfelt thanks also go to Marilyn Ducksworth, Mih-Ho Cha, Catharine Lynch, Craig D. Burke, Leslie Schwartz, Honi Werner, and Wendy Pearl. Special thanks to my sharp-eyed copy editor, Tony Davis, who misses nothing, and, lastly, to my talented editor, Sarah McGrath, for her patience, foresight, and guidance.
Finally, thank you, Roya. For reading this story, again and again, for weathering my minor crises of confidence (and a couple of major ones), for never doubting. This book would not be without you. I love you.
POSTSCRIPT
BY KHALED HOSSEINI
This extract is taken from a speech given at Book Expo America on 2 June, 2007.
Ibegan writing like the boy in The Kite Runner, Amir. I grew up in Kabul in the 1970s, and I wrote poems and little plays that I would coax my siblings and cousins into staging for our parents at parties. I also wrote short stories, which I recall were dark, intense, even unabashedly, proudly melodramatic and, in their own childish way, dealt with issues of loyalty, friendship and class struggle. They made up for what they lacked in subtlety and style with a big, winning, expansive heart, which are words that some people have used, maybe with some justification, to describe The Kite Runner.
The language in which I’ve written has changed. I began writing in Farsi, then I wrote in French and now I mostly write in English, but one thing remains constant: I’ve always written for an audience of one. For me, writing has always been the selfish, self-serving act of telling myself a story. You know, something grabs my interest and compels me to sit down and see it through. This is how The Kite Runner was written. I had two boys in mind, one who was conflicted and on very unsure moral ground, the other pure and loyal and rooted in integrity. I knew that their friendship was doomed, that there would be a falling out and that this would impact the lives of those around them in a profound way. The how and why that would happen was the compulsion that led me to sit down and write that novel in March 2001.
I never intended to get the novel published. Even when I was as far as two-thirds of the way through writing, it never crossed my mind that anybody would actually read it although I thought my wife probably would because she loves me. So you can imagine my astonishment at the reception that The Kite Runner has received worldwide since its publication. I received letters from India, London, Sydney, Paris, Arkansas, all over the world from readers who expressed a passion to me. Many of them wanted to know how to send money to Afghanistan. Some told me they wanted to adopt an Afghan orphan. In those letters I saw the unique ability that fiction has to connect people who dress differently or practice different religions, and I saw how universal some human experiences are, like friendship, guilt, forgiveness, loss and atonement.
In those letters, I also saw how I had unwittingly placed myself in a daunting position—that of following up The Kite Runner, and writing a book that, through no fault of its own, would bear the burden of comparison to The Kite Runner, while the ink was still wet on its pages. The reading of every fan letter I received was punctuated by a loud and anxious gulp and a feeling of pity for this as-yet-unwritten