Damon Galgut is the most generous-spirited, profoundly gifted and oddly approachable human. I am indebted in ways I can’t count for the critique, the encouragement, the consideration, the commiseration and the line edits (yes, he won the Booker Prize and then did line edits for me). I lose faith in humanity constantly, but saying thank you to Damon would be like sending a gift voucher after someone has altered your life and restored your faith in the species. They don’t have cards for those! Damon spoke to me about my debut novel, therapy, and motherlands.Article continues after advertisement
–Faraaz Mahomed
*
Damon Galgut: You’re a psychologist and work in the field of mental health and human rights. What is the crossover, if any, between that world and your fiction?
Faraaz Mahomed: You’re one of the few people who have seen the travails of my first—as yet unpublished—novel. It’s about a therapist. You probably recall that it recounted in rather painful detail the inner workings of a therapy session and the existential question of what makes a life worth living. So I think the question of crossover is much more easily answered in that sense—after all, what is psychotherapy if not storytelling? (and thank you for the notes. I am still working on them!) With Mother/Land and my work on human rights, that too is really fairly easily gleaned from the perspective of the events of the book. Whether we’re talking about Rhodes Must Fall or Black Lives Matter, there’s no shortage of human rights content in my novel.
