Jean Hatoum - Author

 There is a moment when an author writes the final sentence. The cursor stops. The page becomes still. And for a moment, there is nothing left to add. You have written the last word. You have closed the document. You have read the pages so many times that you can almost hear them without looking. You think: This is it. The book is finished. But I don't think a book really ends there. Maybe that is only where the author's part begins to change. For months, sometimes years, a book belongs almost entirely to the person writing it. You wake up thinking about it. You carry sentences around in your head. You rewrite paragraphs. You remove things. You put them back. You discover that a chapter you thought was about one thing was actually about something else. You become attached to certain words. You become tired of others. You live inside the book long enough that it starts to feel less like something you are creating and more like somewhere you are living. And ...

  There are parts of me inside this book that I never introduced by name. They are there anyway. In the pauses between sentences. In the poems that change direction halfway through. In the memories I approached carefully, as though they were rooms where someone was still sleeping. In the anger I softened. In the tenderness I almost deleted. In the questions I never managed to answer. When I look at I Wrote So I Would Not Fade now, I sometimes forget that I am looking at a book. Sometimes it feels more like a house I once lived in. Every page has a door. Some of them open easily. Others still make me hesitate. There are rooms I remember building. And there are rooms I entered only after the words were already there. That is one of the strange things about writing. You think you are putting words onto a page. Then, somewhere along the way, you realize the page has been putting you back together in a language you did not know you spoke. I left pieces of my childhood...

  There is something I hope for whenever someone opens my book. Not that they understand everything. Not that they agree with every word. Not even that they like every poem. I hope they find something they were not expecting to find. Maybe a sentence that makes them stop. Maybe a page that feels strangely familiar. Maybe a fragment that puts words around something they had carried for years without knowing how to name it. Because when I wrote these pages, I was not thinking about readers. I was thinking about surviving the page in front of me. I was writing because there were things I could not say aloud. Things that became tangled when spoken, but somehow became clearer when written down. And perhaps that is why I hope someone finds themselves somewhere between my lines. Not because my life is the same as theirs. It isn't. Our wounds have different histories. Our memories have different rooms. What breaks one person may barely touch another. What saves one person may...

There is a strange moment that happens when something you wrote for yourself becomes a book. You hold it in your hands. And suddenly, something that once belonged entirely to you belongs to the world. I don't think I was prepared for that. When I first started writing, I wasn't thinking about publishing. I wasn't thinking about readers. I wasn't thinking about an author page, an ISBN, a paperback, an eBook, or seeing my name on a book cover. I was thinking about getting through the day. The page was private. It was where I could say things without worrying about how they sounded. Where I could write something terrible and leave it there. Where I could write something beautiful and not wonder whether anyone else would understand it. The page didn't need an audience. It only needed honesty. And then, somehow, the pages began becoming something else. A collection. A manuscript. A book. I Wrote So I Would Not Fade. I remember how strange that title fe...