Portrait of novelist Khashayar J. Khabushani © Arianna Shooshani and courtesy Penguin Random House
In his moving essay for ArtReview, “One Day This Boy…”: How David Wojnarowicz Gave Me Life, Khashayar J. Khabushani writes about his profound connection with the life and work of David Wojnarowicz.
The discovery of David’s memoir Close to the Knifes: a Memoir of Disintegration, encouraged Khabushani’s own writing. He explains: “…the things I write about are so fraught, and there was so much silence around them for so long, that after seeing [David] break his own silences or the silences imposed on him, there was really no going back.”
To find his own voice as a writer, Khabushani began journaling about his own childhood and the obstacles he faced as a closeted young boy born to Iranian immigrant parents struggling to acclimate to life in East Los Angeles.
Using his own emotional history as part of his palette, Khabushani recently published his debut novel, I Will Greet the Sun Again. Porochista Khakpour of The Washington Post describes it as “[a] masterful debut . . . a novel of survival and longing and love, and in many ways a modern portrait of an artist as a young man . . . a book written for us, we Iranian Americans whom you don’t often hear about.”
Listen to The Foundation’s interview with Khashayar J. Khabushani, below.
