On Crossing Borders: An Interview with Helen Benedict by Jamie Kahn
Helen Benedict, a British-American professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven previous novels, six books of nonfiction, and a play. Her newest novel, The Good Deed (Red Hen Press), is set in a refugee camp in Greece, and comes out of the research Helen conducted for her 2022 nonfiction book, Map of Hope and Sorrow, co-authored with Syrian writer and refugee Eyad Awwadawnan. The novel follows the stories of five women: four women living in an over-crowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos and an American tourist who comes to Samos to escape her own dark secret.
Jamie Kahn: Having written so much about refugees both in fiction and nonfiction, what does the relationship between those processes look like for you? Does your nonfiction influence your fiction at all?
Helen Benedict: The only way my nonfiction helps my fiction is in research. What I see, what I hear, what I learn. I never base my fiction on any real person, as that would only result in thinly disguised journalism, which would make for both bad fiction and bad nonfiction. But I do believe that if one is going to write fiction set in real places and encompassing real events, one should be accurate about those. So although the people in my novel, The Good Deed, are all invented, I like to say they all could exist. Likewise, even as the events that happen to those people are also invented, they, too, could happen to anyone in their circumstances.
I do pull in bits and pieces of real stories I've heard, and real events, however. And I fact-check everything.
In the end however, writing fiction and nonfiction is so different that it's as if they use different sides of the brain. Writing fiction is like controlled daydreaming, whereas writing nonfiction is more like putting together a complicated three-dimensional puzzle. I would also say that the adventure in writing fiction happens in the writing itself—I discover all sorts of surprises as I write and invent. In contrast, the adventure in writing nonfiction happens in the research. That's when I discover new things. By the time I sit down to write it, I already know what I want to say, so it's just a matter of figuring out how to organize and express it.
JK: Having written other material that’s so related to the subjects covered in The Good Deed, what did your research process look like for this book in particular?
HB: In 2018, I went to the Greek island of Samos in the Northern Aegean because I knew it held one of the most overcrowded and inhumane refugee camps in Europe. Other writers had been going to a different island for years by then, Lesbos, but I wanted to write about a place that had been overlooked. I went there originally to research The Good Deed, as I already had a novel in mind, but when I saw how dire the situation there was, and how miserable the lives of the people in that camp, I felt it was urgent to write about it as a journalist, too.
During that first visit, and then over more visits in the following years, I befriended several people who were living in the camp while awaiting asylum, and listened to their stories. We spoke for hundreds of hours over many months, digging into their memories of their childhoods and homes, family and loves, cooking and careers, not just talking about their lives as refugees. In this way, I came to have a deep feeling for who they were and all they had been through, happy and sad.
I drew on this knowledge for my book. I would not have dared do it otherwise. But I also relied on my friend and co-author, Eyad Awwadawnan, the young Syrian I met in the camp who later became my co-author. He read every word and we talked for many hours while he helped me correct my mistakes and get the details of life in Syria and in the camp right.
JK: In general, you’ve written a lot of material about war and conflict, as we’ll as its aftermath. What are the obligations of the novelist to tell these stories?
HB: I would never preach about what obligations a novelist or any other artist has. But for me, I do feel the need to write about people who have been marginalized or victimized in some unfair way by society. I suppose that, for me, I do feel obliged—or at least driven—to use my writing to expose injustice, whether that injustice stems from war, prejudice, class, gender, etc. But I will say that I really hate war!
JK: Re: the previous question, what is it that attracts you to these stories?
HB: I think one of the main reasons writers write, or at least I do, is to experience the adventure of becoming someone else, of leaving our own skins, lives and cultures to dive into those utterly different from us. Such freedom we writers have to soar out of ourselves like that! So when I wonder, what would it be like to be a refugee? Or to live in a war? Or to be a new immigrant and a mother at fourteen? Or to marry a stranger and move across the world, I research, listen, read, and then write to find out.
JK: Similarly to your and Eyad Awwadawnan's book, Map of Hope and Sorrow, The Good Deed fixes its gaze on five stories in particular. Is this intentional? Is there a significance to the figure of five? Or was it coincidental?
HB: The number five doesn't mean anything; I never even thought about that being the same in both books! The Good Deed also has one man's voice in it, too, but I don't want to spill any spoilers. For the nonfiction, we wanted to give each person three chapters, so they could talk about their lives at home, their journeys, and their time in Greece. We didn't want to pigeonhole people as only refugees, as if their lives only started at the border of Europe—as if refugees aren't as fully rounded and complicated as the rest of us. I felt the same about the people in my novel; their lives are about more than being refugees.
JK: How did the idea for this book(s) come to you? What made you want to write Map of Hope and Sorrow?
HB: My motivations for writing fiction and nonfiction tend to be very different, but sometimes they overlap. My main impetus for writing both The Good Deed and Map of Hope and Sorrow was to push back against the demonization and stereotyping of refugees that autocratic, right-wing governments are peddling ever more loudly around the world. In both books, I wanted to portray people so often seen as the Other — Muslim people, African people, displaced people — in their full humanity. I wanted, in short, to remind everyone that, at heart, we human beings have much more in common than we have differences.
JK: I’d love to hear you speak particularly about the spotlight on women's stories in this book.
HB: Yes, part of my idea for this novel was a group of women telling one another their stories, and shoring one another up under hardship. I actually had that idea before I even thought of making it about refugees living in a camp in Greece. Originally, this novel was going to be set in an imaginary prison, with women whispering stories to one another through drainage vents. But I had already been writing about refugees before and when I went to that island, the drama, tragedy and strange juxtaposition of beauty and suffering took me over and fused with my original idea to turn into The Good Deed.
JK: The Good Deed is also a book about the way grief changes us and sometimes distorts reality for us. How did this play into the style and the storytelling?
HB: Writers often work a lot more subconsciously than a reader might suppose. Which is to say that I didn’t sit down and ask myself how to use grief in the storytelling. What did happen is that, as my characters began to tell the sadder sides of their stories, their words became increasingly stark, blunt, and even bitter, which I think is often what happens to people who have been through something horrendous. And then, to go back to your earlier question about why I chose to have the women in the novel tell one another their stories, I liked the idea of making the storytelling a conversation, with the women pushing back, debating and even teasing one another as the stories unwind.
JK: Can you talk about the function of motherhood in The Good Deed?
HB: The subject of motherhood is unfathomably rich for writers, encompassing the deepest love and therefore deepest vulnerability a person can have. I never realized until I became a mother what a world of fear and pain and worry would open, as well as, of course, joy and reward. All this comes up in the novel, providing much of the tension in the plot, as well as a bond between the mothers who are friends.
JK: Did you have any influences in mind when writing this book?
HB: This might be surprising, but the book that inspired it all was a 1972 novella by Edna O'Brien called simply, Night. Otherwise, I was very moved by Syrian poet Maram al-Masri's collection, Liberty Walks Naked.
JK: What are you reading (and/or loving) right now?
HB: Two books that recently blew me away: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. And Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
JK: If you don’t mind my asking, what are you working on next?
HB: I'm working on a novel called The Soldier's House, which is connected to my earlier novels about the Iraq War and its aftermath, Wolf Season and Sand Queen. This one is about an Iraqi widow and her family who move to the U.S. to live with an American soldier. The story raises questions about whether reparation and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of an unjust war. The book will be published in 2026.
Jamie Kahn is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has been featured in Glamour, Brooklyn Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Epiphany, and others. She serves as the contributing features editor for Epiphany Magazine and is the programming and development manager for The Urbane Arts Club.
