INTERVIEW: Ledia Xhoga (Misinterpretation)
Misinterpretation
Ledia Xhoga
Tin House
Interview by Anu Khosla
When I interviewed Ledia Xhoga, I did so on Zoom. She was in New York, and I was in San Francisco. A whole mass of land and immigrants lay out amidst the country between us and our two coastal cities. Her novel, Misinterpretation, tells the story of an unnamed Albanian interpreter living in New York with her American husband, Billy, who just can’t seem to stop trying to help the fellow immigrants she comes across. What begins as an admirable trait in the narrator spirals quickly into unchecked compulsion that threatens to risk both her day job and her marriage.
As Ledia and I spoke, we kept coming back around to language. The narrator’s power over the other characters in the novel is largely her abilities with language, but it is also her gift to them. Language is the locus at which she can show care. And yet, for someone with such a facility for language, the narrator is again and again –– now comically, now frighteningly –– misinterpreting the things she sees and hears.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anu Khosla: Starting the book, I didn't know what I was getting into, but I felt that the opening scene read like a spy novel. Can you tell me a little bit about writing that opening and what you intended to do there?
Ledia Xhoga: A spy novel? Oh, my God. It wasn’t intentional, but I understand what you mean. It has a noir feeling, which is really interesting. A lot of comments I've received are that the novel turns into a thriller halfway through, which is interesting because I didn't anticipate that that's where it was going. So I'm thinking that maybe the seeds to come were already there, and you saw them. But it wasn't intentional.
AK: Was there any part of this text where you were trying to write something that felt like a thriller?
LX: No. There’s a scene late in the novel where the protagonist follows a man who is harassing one of her acquaintances into a shoe store. After that scene, the novel took on a tone of its own. It embraced the genre it wanted to embrace at that point, and I was pretty open to it. It almost felt like the book wrote itself after that. I delayed writing that scene for a while, but every time I thought about it, I thought, Yeah, that's right. She has to go. She has to meet him. And then it became darker and darker and spookier. But I'm glad that that feeling showed up in the beginning.
It's intimidating to let the novel have a life of its own. Sometimes the writer can be a little too overwhelming. The writer can try to shape it a little too much. I like to say what Joyce Carol Oates says: you have to be a little bit indifferent to your work. You have to balance working on it a lot, but at the same time letting it breathe.
AK: There's a part where one of the characters introduces the concept of “a life of periphery” early in the novel. I'm curious about the Albanian community in New York, specifically. Do you feel that this community is on the periphery of life in New York City?
LX: Maybe all immigrants live, in a way, a life of periphery, because in the beginning, especially in the beginning, you have the language challenge. You have a certain intimacy with one language, and then suddenly it's something completely different. This whole world is in this new language, and you have to reinvent yourself in a way. Some are better at that than other people. But if you come in and you find a big Albanian community, for example, then maybe that can be limiting. In the case of Alfred, one of the protagonist’s acquaintances, at some point he says, “Everybody around me is Albanian.” He married somebody who was from Albania, and her family was all there. That social context probably made his life a little bit more contained within the Albanian community, which meant that he was more on the periphery of the city, right?
AK: I think this is the first book I've ever read that focuses on this community. How do you see the differences between American or New York culture versus Albanian culture?
LX: Albanian culture is probably similar to the culture of many other immigrants who come to America. When I speak to people who come from Eastern Europe, people who come from India, or people who come from, I don't know, Africa, sometimes I see similarities between us as opposed to a more Western culture. It probably has to do with boundaries. In Albania, it's something as simple as, you don't email people and say, “Let's get a coffee together,” and somebody says, “Okay, let me check my calendar. I have Wednesday the 21st open,” or whatever. You pick up your phone, and you call and say, “I'm passing by your apartment. Can we meet?”
For better or worse, people are much more comfortable living with each other, like families with their married children and things like that. Here, everybody needs their own space.
AK: As I was reading this book, I was reminded that Mother Teresa was Albanian. It was a very brief mention of Mother Teresa, just mentioning the name of the airport. Was she in any way an inspiration for the story or the main character?
LX: That's so funny. When you started with Mother Teresa, and you were saying it was in the novel, I was like, I don't think I ever mentioned it, but you’re right, the airport. Honestly, she did not even cross my mind, but that’s an interesting parallel there.
AK: Do you think the protagonist would relate to her?
LX: Well, I think very little thought goes into what she does. She very compulsively does what she does, and those things relate more to her past and her upbringing rather than her wanting to emulate somebody or have a model. The way she is, everything comes very impulsively, very instinctually. If somebody told her she was like Mother Teresa, perhaps she would consider it a compliment, but it's not the behavior she's trying to model.
AK: Yeah, that makes sense. Let's move to the title, Misinterpretation. Do you have a personal background in translation or interpretation?
LX: Not so much. I interpreted as a volunteer a few times, but it was very random. I had signed up with this organization that helps survivors of torture and refugees. I was supposed to interpret for someone who was from Kosovo, but then it just didn't work out. So, very limited. I never really did it. Of course, in my day-to-day life, I'm married to an American, and my family is Albanian, so I have to interpret quite a lot, but not as a job, not as a paid position.
The interpreter character came from those experiences and this idea of what could have happened. I look back at that experience sometimes, and because I've read this novel so many times, whenever I think back to it, I see myself at the dentist, like in the book. Sometimes, my experience and the fictional story I’ve written merge , and I have to tell myself, no, that wasn't me. That didn’t happen.
AK: You described the way that the narrator experiences language in such a powerful way in the book. I was curious if that scores in any way with your own experience of language. Do you have this ability to pick it up and make sense of a language that you're not familiar with, just from pulling it from the air?
LX: Albania, it's a very small country. You're a small country, you're in the middle of Europe. If you want any interaction with the outside, in that world, you need a different language. Almost everybody I know in Albania speaks Italian. A lot of people speak English. Most of my friends speak three or more languages. So I think it's part of living in a country like that where you, by necessity, have to know all these different languages.
In Europe it’s like that expression, “necessity is the mother of invention.” When other people are expected to speak the language, as in the United States, you always hear people say of immigrants, “Why don't they learn English?” It's such a big place, the United States, and everybody is speaking the same language, so the necessity doesn't arise.
AK: You write secondary characters very well. Billy, the narrator’s husband, was a great example of this. There is a recent crop of novels where we have a very self-involved protagonist with a large interior life that takes up the majority of the text. But in this novel, compared to some of the other recent novels in this tradition, the secondary characters are fully realized, and there is some space for them on the page. Can you tell me a bit about your process for how you write these secondary characters?
LX: I'm sure they were not well-realized in the first draft. I'm sure that they came across a little bit cliché in the beginning, but then, during the second draft, you look at these characters more closely and try to bring them to life. Usually, you can make that happen by observing their interactions with other characters.
I'll give you an example. Initially, in the scene where the interpreter has the two Kurdish women over, they're going to have dinner, she's cooking burek, and they're drinking wine. Then Billy comes back. His trip to LA was canceled. In my early drafts, Billy gets really upset right away. He hit the wall with the apartment door soon after he came home. But that version felt unearned, he just seemed irrational for doing that.
I had to work harder on how he would act with the interpreter during that scene. And so I tried having the interpreter say, “They're not leaving, you go.” That interaction between the narrator and Billy gave the reader a bit more to go off of. It helps the reader understand why he would hit the wall.Kind of like clay, you try to mold that interaction so that somebody can also see his point of view.
AK: In some ways, I admired the narrator or could relate to this feeling of wanting to help, but by the end, I was frustrated with her and her inability to be there for, for example, Billy or her mother. These characters should be the most important people in her life, but she cannot care for them. Do you have a point of view on this act of immersing yourself in volunteering and helping in the way that she does?
LX: Well, I think ideals are very important. But you have to integrate competing priorities within you. If they’re not integrated, then your actions will be unbalanced. For the narrator, this interaction was unbalanced. Also, her compassion and empathy were sometimes accompanied by thoughtlessness. I don’t have a moral message within the book I’m trying to push. I just wanted to portray a character on that road and show what happened to her. But I didn't use it as a cautionary tale.
AK: There's a moment when the narrator is in Albania and she's trying to see a friend that lives there, but that friend is not available. She's reflecting on how she left Albania, she left this country to go to the US, and then she thinks, to paraphrase it, ‘When I come home, does it make these people who stayed regret their staying?’ It felt very self-involved to me. Is that part of that same impetus to care for people, or is it just this self-involvement that she has?
LX: What happens when you start getting into the mind of a character is you just go. It's almost like you are possessed by a spirit. With this character, for me, it was like that. I just wrote whatever came out. I could only hope that every little detail adds to the picture that we have of the character. So that could be an element of it, that she thinks that she is so important that now they would doubt or they would question their life's choices only when she gets back based on her visit. It wasn't intentional, is what I'm trying to say. It's perhaps part of the bigger picture.
AK: For me, the two major themes of this book are, on the one hand, intimacy and, on the other hand, estrangement. These are two competing themes that are in tension with each other. Does New York offer something particular for you about this tension between intimacy and estrangement?
LX: It's interesting because New York is so huge. There are just so many people here. In my own life, some of the best and the closest people that I've gotten to know have been in New York City. As a writer, New York has presented that to me. With some cities, you may have no relationships at all. Or with other cities, they become part of you. They become so intimate.
With New York City in particular, I felt that intimacy with the people, but also with certain movie theaters or with certain museums or with certain parks. It's probably the first time I've actually felt at home in the United States. On the other hand, you have the harshness, you have the cold winters, and you have the fact that you're still speaking a language that's not your language, right? New York represents that, perhaps. It's like intimacy and strangeness. I feel like every immigrant is seeking intimacy in this vast land of strangeness and weirdness.
