Can We Summon a State of Being by Writing about It? Ayad Akhtar on The Radiance

Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist, author of American Dervish and Homeland Elegies, joins host Tess Callahan to talk about his new novel, The Radiance. The book follows a writer (also named Ayad) who wakes from a hit-and-run accident into an unbidden state of heightened perception that unfolds over eight months as he navigates an academic scandal in a politically divided town. 

Ayad talks about writing as “melding” with a register of experience rather than executing a plan; the idea of autofiction as “doing the truth, but better”; the influence of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Plato’s cave; and what it means to come back down the mountain after a genuine experience of grace. He asks the political meaning of grace. We also get into Falstaff, Ayad’s father, and what constitutes greatness in a person.

The Radiance was published September 29, 2026.  Ayad is touring 28 cities this fall, dates available here:  https://ayadakhtar.com/

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Tess Callahan: 0:06

Welcome to Writers at the Well, a podcast that offers intimate conversations with authors about how they draw words and images up from the depths of their inner well. How do they move into a flow state? Do they meditate, walk in nature, do they do cartwheels? Let's find out. I'm your host, Tess Callahan, author of the novels April and Oliver and Dawnland. I hope you enjoy this deep dive into the inner workings of the creative process. My guest today is Ayad Akhtar, novelist and playwright, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the author of the novels *American Dervish* and *Homeland Elegies* which the New York Times named one of the best books of 2020. As a playwright, his credits include McNeil, Junk, Disgraced, The Who and the What, and The Invisible Hand, several of which have played on Broadway and earned Tony nominations. He was named the New York State author in 2021 and served as president of PEN America from 2021 to 2023. he is here to talk about his new novel, *The Radiance* a story that follows a writer navigating the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident, moving between spiritual awakening and academic scandal, rural America and Europe, the intimate and the metaphysical. Please welcome Ayad Akhtar.

Ayad Akhtar: 1:42

Thank you.

Tess Callahan: 1:43

Delight to have you here.

Ayad Akhtar: 1:44

Delight to be here. Where do where do those birds find you? I hear some birds in the background.

Tess Callahan: 1:51

I thought the birds were in your background.

Ayad Akhtar: 1:54

I don't think they. They might not be. But anyway.

Tess Callahan: 1:57

Okay. So the listeners have some birds with us. Birds are everywhere, of course. Yeah, and I do feed them, so that's they are invited. They are an invited audience here.

Ayad Akhtar: 2:06

Yes, yes.

Tess Callahan: 2:09

Would you like to say anything about the book beyond my my brief introduction of it? There,

Ayad Akhtar: 2:14

you know, the book is a complicated interweave of book about presence and a book about the state of the nation, or at least the state of our culture, and you know I think you you invoke the inciting incident in which the narrator, who has you know many of the facts of my life as well as my name, is hit from behind by a pickup truck on a country road. He's moved to the country, and wakes up 36 hours later in a hospital room, and he's he no longer has a spleen, and he also has woken up into a kind of silence and luminosity, and a and a growing emotional pliancy that continues to evolve and change and deepen over the next eight months, and and the state, this state, this radiant state, if you will, endures for that period. And the book basically tracks his experience in that time. So yeah, I mean, I think I just expanded on what you said about

Tess Callahan: 3:18

it. Yeah, no, it's it's stunningly portrayed in the novel, and can you talk about the spark or the voice in your head that led you to write this?

Ayad Akhtar: 3:28

I'd always been intrigued by the idea that you know one of the writers I love the most, Montaigne, French essayist, who's really in many ways the kind of he's the first progenitor of interiority, at least in in the Western tradition, you know, Shakespeare read Montaignan famously, then wrote Hamlet. Montaigne had had an experience where he was thrown from a horse and ended up in a beatitude that lasted three or four days, that transformed his life because he recognized that death was not what he thought it was. It was a near-death experience, but it was one that endured. It was that proximity to something, something that Tolstoy so beautifully articulates at the end of the death of Ivan Ilyich, and and and so many other writers, you know, have tried to articulate and have gone have articulated this experience, whatever this experience is, and so I wanted to I wanted to take that as a kind of inciting incident, if you will, to to invoke the the class at the center of the of the book. There's a you know the narrator's also teaching a class about creative writing and teaching his students to take inciting incidents from other people's work and then incorporate it into their own. So I think I similarly did something like that as well. So

Tess Callahan: 4:44

lovely. So you have this this idea comes to you from him, right? You're doing what you teach.

Ayad Akhtar: 4:50

It came to me from life, but how to write about it is really the question. Okay. So how do you how do you frame an experience in narrative form? That is going to be compelling, and because I'm a dramatist fundamentally, so I, I've got to have a sequence of actions that follow from one another in a kind of decisive and escalating sort of way. So, you know, the inciting incident came from Montaigne, and actually, interestingly enough, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, similarly had an episode like this in his life, where he was run over by a Great Dane and fell down, and for the next few hours was in a state he called the great, the most beautiful state he had ever experienced in his life. So you know, stuff like this is going on. People are writing about it and figuring out how how to get a hold of a way in is was was really the formal challenge.

Tess Callahan: 5:47

Yeah, and it's so rarely written about. I can only think of one other novel that I've read, Ron Hanson novel called Marriot in Ecstasy, that even touches this, and it's so ineffable. So it's it's a great challenge, and hats off.

Ayad Akhtar: 6:05

Thanks. The Russians are always writing around it.

Tess Callahan: 6:08

Yeah, that's true. So the idea comes to you partly from that, partly from your own experience, and then as you sit down to write, do you need do you find that you need to cultivate a certain mind state, or do you invite certain the

Ayad Akhtar: 6:23

eternal question? It it got to a point where I think the writing was its own way in. That I would sit down to write, and the act of summoning language, shaping language to a certain register of consciousness induced its own focus and brought about its own explication and its own birthed in many ways its own language. I found myself often thinking,"Oh, I know I have to do all these tasks today in the writing, but I had no idea how I would do them. And I would sit down to write, and even if I had a list of like these are the points, and like this is happens next, and this character says this, and all of these sorts of things, I couldn't write that way. I had to just kind of embrace not knowing where I was, and then letting it happen. And it was interesting because sometimes what I was going to write that day would I would write three days later, but what I wrote that day was something that was necessary for. You know, it's a there was a deeper logic and a deeper sense of trust and a kind of guidance, I think, in the language itself.

Tess Callahan: 7:47

Yeah, I've heard you talk about writing as a mind meld. So melding with with what is my question.

Ayad Akhtar: 7:54

Yeah, that is that's a good question. Melding with the particulars of a certain subtle register of experience, being sensitive to that register of experience, and then allowing that to be the way forward.

Tess Callahan: 8:17

And was that experience different with this book than the other books or plays you've written?

Ayad Akhtar: 8:22

Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think there was a, I think there was just a level of trust and certain technical challenges that were so extraordinary. I mean, there were certain technical challenges with this book that were so much greater than my capacity to solve them, and I didn't have consciously. I didn't have the craft to do it in many cases, but found that by trusting, really, really trusting the the present sentence, that I was finding my way. I was finding my way through absorption. I was finding my way through compression. I was finding my way through change of the sentence. The sentence changed in this book for me. My understanding of what how a sentence could operate changed. I've generally thought of a sentence as delivering meaning, and I think in this book I understood that the sentence really could be a way to simply move an unknown forward with the feint of meaning that you you promise meaning but you've actually just moved you've kicked the can further and in a way I think every sentence in the book is kicking some unanswerable can down the road, and I, I just kept doing it. I kept finding that I could do it in new ways if I just trusted that that's what I was doing.

Tess Callahan: 9:51

Ah, that's an extraordinary openness. I really appreciate that, especially as someone who already has a lot of success behind you. With writing, that you kind of let go of that and let a new way forward with the sent on the sentence level,

Ayad Akhtar: 10:09

yeah,

Tess Callahan: 10:09

come to you and through you,

Ayad Akhtar: 10:12

yeah.

Tess Callahan: 10:12

I think it's pretty unusual.

Ayad Akhtar: 10:15

It was fun. I mean, it was also scary. It was also scary because you don't know how much you can test the prevailing sentiments or the prevailing forms or or the prevailing sense of what a sentence should be doing, and how much you can compensate, how much you can give in rhythm and beauty, where that's enough to kind of keep the reader rhythmically attached to the movement of the story, like you just don't know, and and I didn't know. I mean, I I was certainly having fun writing the book, but I would come home and talk to my wife about it and say, you know, I mean, I have no idea if it's going to make any sense, you know. Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 11:00

really trusting the the guidance of the thing itself.

Ayad Akhtar: 11:04

Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 11:05

yeah, that's that's really very encouraging. It's very heartening. It's a tall order, I think.

Ayad Akhtar: 11:12

I mean, Updike used to talk about how every book taught him how to write

Tess Callahan: 11:16

it. That

Ayad Akhtar: 11:17

by the time he figured it out, the book was finished. That the process of writing a book is really about the process of learning how to write this particular book. Yeah, it just you know some some books are more challenging than others, and sometimes we're we're up for a bigger challenge than we have been in the past. I just felt like something's happening to the reader, and I wanted to I wanted to go find them today. I didn't want to rely on the notion that if I told a well-told story that was precisely rendered, that that was going to be enough. I just was not confident that that would be enough,

Tess Callahan: 11:56

because we as readers are changing.

Ayad Akhtar: 11:58

Yeah, because we don't want to read. Because we don't read, because we skim, because we have to be hooked,

Tess Callahan: 12:06

yeah,

Ayad Akhtar: 12:06

like fish. We got to have the, we have to be snared before we're going to allow our attention to be corralled or sort of like tamed. The unruliness of the sort of distracted consciousness today is so extraordinary that to find a set of objects that could meaningfully tether a reader today just felt like a very very different challenge than a traditional you know three act structure beginning middle and end compelling characters just not enough,

Tess Callahan: 12:42

and of course, you have in here a character who who himself is spontaneously dropped into long periods of meditation. Not so much that he's meditating, but he's being meditated.

Ayad Akhtar: 12:56

Yeah, beautifully put. Wow, that's lovely. Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 12:59

and so the distraction falls away. We get to experience that with him. Very delicious,

Ayad Akhtar: 13:06

beautiful.

Tess Callahan: 13:08

So, for listeners who are not familiar with autofiction, so as in your earlier novels, American Dervish and Homeland Elegies, your main character here is Aad, and he has your your name, your occupation, your preoccupations, and so I gather that your autofiction is based largely on fact, but then you allow the story to diverge from the truth from truth with a lowercase t in pursuit of truth with an uppercase T something like that. Is that happening?

Ayad Akhtar: 13:41

I love that. I mean, I love that somebody once described and said, "Oh, I understand what you're doing. You're just trying to do the truth, but better.

Tess Callahan: 13:50

That's great.

Ayad Akhtar: 13:51

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, how do I make it better? How do I make the truth more interesting? You know, how do I make it more compelling? How do I give it more dimension? How do I allow it to contain more complexity, more richness, more contradiction, a better portrayal of you know I live in the country now, better portrayal of the area that I live in, you know. But hewing to the simple, obvious, ordinary facts isn't necessarily always going to do the trick. So you got to concoct, but the concocting can be coming from life, or it can be coming from other people's work, or whatever it may be, and so it is a it is a fashioning, if you will. You know, it's a fashioning in in service of a higher goal, a higher metaphorical truth, a higher you know literary truth or sociological truth, but but it isn't strictly true. I think the the whole idea of autofiction. I mean, I think I sort of talk about it in the book. It's like I'm not sure I even know what that word means, but it's one that's used now to sort of encapsulate. And I think it does a good job of at least raising the issue of the self. And I think the notion of the. Thral into the self and the rise of a certain kind of narcissistic orientation, which I think has become increasingly widespread because of the devices and the digital cognition and whatnot. And I think that there is something about an interest in the curation of the self, or the staging of the self, or the crisis of the self, which is effectively at least outlined in this notion of autofiction, you know, creating fiction with the the illusion that it's somehow real. Of course, it's it's not new. Philip Roth did it brilliantly in the Counter Life and Operation Shylock and Marcel Proust. It's nothing but autofiction. You know, go all the way back to Rousseau, going back to that first Confessions, that autobiography, which may also be largely made up, or at least partly made up. So, it's not a new idea. In in a way, goes all the way back to Saint Augustine, because we can't pretend that Saint Augustine was telling us the truth with a small t was telling us the truth with a capital T. But I think it's a contemporary form of that more enduring modality,

Tess Callahan: 16:07

and it certainly, as for me as a reader, kept me particularly alert. Like there, there was a degree of alertness in the reading that I don't normally have because part of my brain is saying, "Oh, did it happen? Well,

Ayad Akhtar: 16:23

that's exactly, and that's the main reason to do it today. Is because you know because this this whole notion of reality, what reality is, and and and reality as a kind of form of entertainment for us in the 21st century means that there's a different different kind of engagement with material that we think could be real or that is real, so yeah, that's yet another reason to to do it.

Tess Callahan: 16:47

So I'm interested in this kind of fork in the road that you come to. Like, so let's say you you have a scene from life and you're writing, and then at a certain point it diverges. Yeah, right. You go this way, so I'm just interested in that moment.

Ayad Akhtar: 17:04

Sure,

Tess Callahan: 17:05

like what's happening for you as a writer.

Ayad Akhtar: 17:08

Let me comment that moment a little bit differently.

Tess Callahan: 17:10

Sure, the

Ayad Akhtar: 17:11

moment is created through a set of influences and personal givens that I array in such a way that is both drawn from life and drawn from others, and I am then in a situation where the scene rhymes with what's real, but that rhyme never has to come to a moment of decision like you're talking about. The question then becomes: Do I have to hew to the rhyme the perfect rhyme? Can I play with a slant rhyme? Can it be an eye rhyme? Can it be a distant rhyme? How? What is the array of rhyming that I'm going to use to fashion the scene? Because it needs to have a coherence. It needs to feel coherent. So I can't abandon whatever that logic is, but maybe that logic can be less rigid, if you will.

Tess Callahan: 18:10

I love that way of of looking at it. That gives me new eyes on it. Rhyming, yeah.

Ayad Akhtar: 18:16

I think there's no scene in the book that per se starts as my scene, you know, for example, to give you a late scene in the book in which the narrator is giving an event at a local library as part of his quote-unquote state author obligations. So I gave an event at a local library as part of my state author obligations. So that was one piece of a scene that was arrayed to accomplish many goals, and so I could draw from that scene that I had been in, and I do do draw from it. I'm sure some who were at that event might think, "Oh, I was there. I remember that happening, or whatever it may be. But my fidelity is not to what happened. My fidelity is to the job that it has to fulfill within the larger narrative that I'm unfolding.

Tess Callahan: 19:09

Yeah, so you're living back in that space imaginatively. It's not not so much a memory as a now it's living in your imaginable space.

Ayad Akhtar: 19:19

Interestingly, the neuroscience of memory has increasingly told us that the visual circuits responsible for imagination and memory are basically in the same area. So the the idea that we are remembering something because we're visually recalling it is actually it's now that we are reseeing. It is a reseeing that is actually much closer to a seeing called forth from the notion of memory, and in a way, all of these questions are of course far more complicated and. Less reified than we imagine them to be, which is the subject of the book consciousness, and how consciousness is and is not sort of operating. So some of these confusions, and certainly the whole notion of an autofiction-that is to say, a fiction that might be me, a fiction that has my name, that is to say, my identity, that that autofiction is itself an impediment or an obstacle to a different kind of experience of consciousness.

Tess Callahan: 20:31

The autofiction that do you mean the autofiction, the fiction of a me?

Ayad Akhtar: 20:36

Yeah.

Tess Callahan: 20:37

At all?

Ayad Akhtar: 20:37

Yeah.

Tess Callahan: 20:38

Yeah.

Ayad Akhtar: 20:40

Yeah. And the book stage, you know, there's this this section called investigations in autofiction, which sprawls throughout the whole book and continues, and then comes back and disappears and comes back, and you know, it's a long, extended kind of series of exercises and experiments, really. And the final the final section of that is basically the dissolution of the narrator self, sitting in a church as his awareness of a body disappears, and then the notion of the names that are attached to any experience-a chair, light, me-no longer have the kind of tethering force that they usually do.

Tess Callahan: 21:27

So many ways I want to go with this, and why why do you feel this is an exploration for our time now?

Ayad Akhtar: 21:36

I think we've spent a couple of 100 years thinking that we're machines, and that the mechanistic notion of the body's functioning, or of or the brain's functioning, or of consciousness itself as being a kind of downstream effect of a kind of Newtonian movement of molecules in our brain is an outmoded way of thinking about being and human being, and I think in an era of the rise of the machine, it's going to become increasingly clear that we are not machines. I don't think it's for nothing that the sort of rise of psychedelics and the return of religious faith and experience to the mainstream is happening at this time, and I think the investigations of the book. I think I'd like to think are more permanent. They're not about this moment, but I do. But I do think they, I do think they respond, or at least are an attempt to respond to something that's happening in the world now.

Tess Callahan: 22:39

Yes, when rational materialism is pushing us through this reducing valve,

Ayad Akhtar: 22:45

yeah, and and and we're not we're not that you know it's an it's a good model it's a good model for doing all kinds of things, but it's not what we are. It certainly doesn't answer any of the big questions. It brackets all those questions and says, "Okay, well, those are not questions. They have no answer, so we're not going to ask those questions, and then we're just going to focus on this other stuff. But those questions don't go away,

Tess Callahan: 23:10

right? Yeah. The problem of consciousness, right?

Ayad Akhtar: 23:15

Origin, consciousness, meaning, structure,

Tess Callahan: 23:18

yeah.

Ayad Akhtar: 23:19

Magic,

Tess Callahan: 23:20

yes, yeah. So,

Ayad Akhtar: 23:25

those are all very serious things.

Tess Callahan: 23:27

I am totally so with you. I can see

Ayad Akhtar: 23:30

it on your face. This

Tess Callahan: 23:31

is where I live. Yes,

Ayad Akhtar: 23:34

I want to convey it, you know, vocally to those who may be listening that there, you know, there is a. Those are all very, very serious matters. They're not, and sometimes don't get their due in public discourse. Even as for so many of us, they are the most important things in our lives.

Tess Callahan: 23:52

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's ultimately for all of us, right? I mean, it's it's meaning, right?

Ayad Akhtar: 24:01

Yeah, that's right.

Tess Callahan: 24:02

So before the character Ayad has his accident, he is already having precognitive dreams and uncanny coincidences. What Carl Jung would call synchronicities.

Ayad Akhtar: 24:17

Yes, earlier earlier in his life, when he was in analysis briefly for for two years, and yes, yes, it's true. He does have all those experiences,

Tess Callahan: 24:26

or he'll write about someone and then he'll run into them the next morning. Well, which happens to many of us as writers, as you know.

Ayad Akhtar: 24:35

Very weird thing about writing that I don't think any of us totally understand.

Tess Callahan: 24:39

Yeah, so I wonder if you see that as like precursor to what happens to him after the accident, the experience of radiance.

Ayad Akhtar: 24:48

Well, to be sure, because structurally, what I was doing by enumerating some of those things is I was laying a kind of trap where. The instance of magic is being described in a way that the reader can may not share, but can certainly understand. And I'm I'm sowing the ground. I'm sort of like it's you know in a mythic structure, it would be the it would be the the hero finding the potion that doesn't know what the potion is, but tastes the potion and suddenly something moves or something happens, you know, and it's before the entry into this sort of journey of what is actually going to happen. But it's a kind of precursor. It's a way of sowing the field with you know mythic objects or the uncanny or the magical. It's a way I think about structure a lot. I think the the more mythic the structure can be at its core, I think the more resonant the story tends to be. So, if you can really get to a place where you're working from a kind of primordial mythic structure, then you know, even if you're doing something quite banal, it can feel much bigger.

Tess Callahan: 26:00

Yeah. So when when Ayad in the in the book has this catastrophic experience that lands him in this state of enlightenment, his locus of consciousness he finds is no longer behind his eyes; it's somewhere behind his sternum.

Ayad Akhtar: 26:18

Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 26:19

and the descriptions of that Ayot are so. I for me they rival Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Teresa of Avila. I mean, it's just, and I think all the more so because it's not mapped on to a tradition for the character. So it's it's so fresh.

Ayad Akhtar: 26:39

Yeah, it's phenomenologically reported, as as opposed to within a tradition. Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 26:45

right. So

Ayad Akhtar: 26:46

don't would be hard to compete with Meister Eckhart. I mean, like that's that's the level.

Tess Callahan: 26:52

But it's deeply moving. I found it deeply moving because it's so pure, and I felt like well, AI did not write this without experiencing it. It would be impossible. I mean, can I ask you about that, or would you rather not?

Ayad Akhtar: 27:08

No, no. I'm happy to. I'm happy to say what I can. I mean, I. I think, as I said earlier, I've said a few things, and I'll say them again. One is, I think that a lot of these experiences are not necessarily as elusive. They, they are there. They are they they exist within a subtle fabric of our daily experience. And I certainly know that paying attention to my dreams, as I have for most of my life, has attuned me to a certain register of experience within waking consciousness that rhymes with dreaming consciousness. And so maybe that gives me a little bit more-I don't know-a wider, a wider window, if you will. So that's one thing I'd say is that I think we're all having different-we're all having different kinds of experiences that we we may not account for, we may not pay much attention to. But I think once you start paying attention, something changes. Something begins to open, open up, and and this book was a way to really pay attention, if you will. Was to really sort of stop and say, okay, I'm going to spend a couple of years really paying attention to this stuff, and I'm going to write about it, and and that fascinating thing about finding language for it, and this is really remarkable. I just is so remarkable. I don't know what the neuroscience of this is, but finding language for it seemed to seem to husband a movement through

Tess Callahan: 28:38

it.

Ayad Akhtar: 28:39

That there was something about finding language for it that summoned it further, so was a way to write. Writing was a way of trying to know more. Yeah.

Tess Callahan: 28:51

Wow, that's fascinating. The ad in the book, he makes some attempts to map it onto neurological explanations and psychological explanations, and there are some interesting things that emerge from that. But it's ultimately not satisfying to him. It seems,

Ayad Akhtar: 29:14

yeah.

Tess Callahan: 29:15

And he seems averse to entertaining more mystical explanations. Would you say that's true of him to a certain point in the novel?

Ayad Akhtar: 29:26

I think he's. I think he is grappling with language in the 21st century. Yeah, and I think he is alarmed enough by parallels to seizure disorders or pre-epileptic auras and various things that he's been told about or read about, and the fact that it all did come from an accident. You know, as I spoke, there was a neurosurgeon who I spoke to for this book, and and who was a kind of a consultant for me. Wonderful guy. He wrote a book of his own called Gray Matters. Ted. And he, you know, he said,"Look, accidents definitely happen, and do change people's neurological function, and almost never for the better. So there is, you know, the fact that there was an accident that that all of this is downstream of an accident, and a kind of is also something that alarms him enough and keeps him in the proximity of conversations with doctors enough that some of the brain science around what might be happening becomes compelling, as it actually the neuro some of the neuroscience of religious experience is actually quite fascinating. So and so that was also a way to sort of explore the possibility of multiple languages. You know, I like to think of the novel as a kind of meeting point of the novel with a capital N. All novels, I like to think of, and certainly the the ones that I admire the most, as a meeting point of languages, a meeting point of various kinds of ways of thinking about reality. So the neurological is meeting the psychological is meeting the historical is meeting. There is a discourse. There is certainly a mystical. There's some kind of interest in the mystical, but it's not as a language is not a definitive language for him in the book. It's not one that can define the experience he's had because he doesn't know what it refers to. He's not necessarily a believer, but he's clearly having these very, very profound, unusual experiences, and experiences which, as you rightly said or earlier, are described in some of the great spiritual texts. And there is a character in the book who knows more about all this stuff than he does, and so she kind of is a kind of a mentor figure, if you will, as he kind of works through some of this stuff.

Tess Callahan: 31:51

Yeah, I felt a conversation happening between this book and your first novel, American Dervish, where young Ayad, oh, he's so pure, and he's really a seeker, and he has a close tie to his aunt Mina, who is amazing. Just one of the most complex, intriguing characters I've met in literature, and anyway, she teaches him to pay attention to the gap in his breath at the bottom of the exhalation, the top of the insulation, just to drop into that stillness and listen.

Ayad Akhtar: 32:35

Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 32:36

and he, through her and through some other experiences he has in that novel, he has experience of experiences of radiance.

Ayad Akhtar: 32:46

Totally,

Tess Callahan: 32:48

and so I felt a kind of conversation through time with this ad. Did you feel that?

Ayad Akhtar: 32:55

I think you know in that in that book, I was I remember when I first read Jonathan Edwards' personal narrative. Have you ever read that work? Exquisite work. I mean, you know, Jonathan Edwards gets a bum rap from from too many people. I think there's a there's a real reason why he stands at the center of sort of American the history of American spirituality. That narrative is such an exquisite rendering of a sensitivity to an order of experience and an order of absorption in creation that is sublime and sublimely rendered with such precision and beauty. And I remember reading personal narrative. I don't know when I was in my mid 20s or something, and thinking, oh, this is like I remember this. I used to have this kind of experience when I was a kid, and you know, the only thing in my experience when I was a kid that sort of like responded to this order of absorption was the Quran and Star Wars. Like those were the things that where I felt like oh that's what what I'm experiencing, I'm seeing what I'm experiencing some way, yeah. And so you know, writing dervish was a way to sort of like re remember and situate that essence of religious faith, I think, the experiential dimension of religious faith, which I think is at the core of what religion is about, in the end, to situate that within a set of situations and characters that staged a different dilemma within the Islamic community, the larger Islamic community, and at a time, you know, I wrote that book. I started writing it five years after 911, and so all of that is part of the texture. Even though I don't, it happens before 911. I never talk about 911. All of that is part of, and then I think after Dervish, you know, kind of moved away from. Addressing all of this stuff with any directness, but somehow with this book, it just it just came you know came back in a different way, and it came back in a much a much more active investigative way.

Tess Callahan: 35:14

Yeah, that's beautiful. So there was a moment in the book, I won't give it away, but it takes place in a cemetery that reminded me of a moment in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Actually, the end of that story has a different outcome, though. But is very striking, and I think it has to do with can we stand to actually be seen? You know, in when Ed in this novel is in this full experience of radiance, he is seeing people. He is seeing people as as they cannot see themselves. So I wonder if you see any resonance there, or anything you want to say about that.

Ayad Akhtar: 36:01

I feel a real kinship with Flannery O'Connor. I I honestly don't know that I would say that I could think of an antecedent in my own sort of concocting of that scene. I think that I imagined that whole section as kind of a riff on a Dostoevsky storyline because Dostoevsky is part of it from the beginning, and then there is this crescendo, which in many ways, what happens in the cemetery happens in the middle of the book. I think most writers would have put that scene later in the book as a kind of culmination. But I felt that you know it would represent a kind of the top of the mountain, if you will. If I was taking this narrator to the top of a mountain, and then he's got to come back down, and then second half the book is about basically coming back to to reality.

Tess Callahan: 36:53

Yes.

Ayad Akhtar: 36:54

So that that scene, you know, which is really a conundrum, I think, for a contemporary reader, in many ways, what does it mean that the narrator-and I won't give it away either-but what does it mean that the narrator has this kind of interaction with the person who hit him? Because that's who he sees in the cemetery. You know, for me, the larger question, in so many ways, with regards to all the traditions, what does it mean for one who sees or has been given an instance of sight or insight or vision or illumination, awakening? What does it mean for life now?

Tess Callahan: 37:40

Yeah.

Ayad Akhtar: 37:41

What What does one do if you were if you had grace? What would you do? What's the meaning of grace? What's the political meaning of grace? Because if it doesn't have a political meaning, then obviously it doesn't have social being in the same way, which is what so many people feel about religious experiences-that somehow it it operates as kind of passport for people to not have a social being, that what they do doesn't matter. And I think that question to me was

central in the book: 38:16

is that if if I was going to try to if I was going to try to narrate an experience of I don't know what the right word is actually radiance is really where I came down on it an experience of radiance. What were the implications? What were the political implications today?

Tess Callahan: 38:35

That is really the question, and that's you know the opposite of that is what's known as spiritual bypassing, right?

Ayad Akhtar: 38:43

Or quietistic, the quietistic tradition, you know. And I think it is a legitimate response to that question to say, well, it turns out that for some who experience the world as seen through that radiance, what they experience is that the world is actually fine.

Tess Callahan: 39:04

Yes,

Ayad Akhtar: 39:05

that the world is fine as it is. It's actually quite perfect, and all of its flaws. That what we see as flaws is actually perfect from a different perspective.

Tess Callahan: 39:15

Right.

Ayad Akhtar: 39:15

And so, if that's the case, then I don't have to do anything.

Tess Callahan: 39:17

Right.

Ayad Akhtar: 39:18

That is also a legitimate response, but it has to be understood as such, and there's a way in which that response is not satisfactory for the rest of us,

Tess Callahan: 39:29

right?

Ayad Akhtar: 39:30

Because we're not living in that place, and there is no answer to any of these really fundamental and I think eternal questions. But I think I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask them, and that scene in particular is one response amongst many that the book has.

Tess Callahan: 39:48

Right, formulating the question is

Ayad Akhtar: 39:50

in dramatic form. Yes,

Tess Callahan: 39:52

right. That's you know a very relevant question because what's true on the absolute level is not necessarily true on the relative. Level, so it doesn't mean, you know. Can we hold that paradox that things can be perfect just as they are, everything perfect, truly, and we also have to attend to all the mess and the the systems, you know, that are making us worse as human beings and take responsibility for that individually and collectively can both be true.

Ayad Akhtar: 40:26

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in some cases, in the book, there are moments when both can be true, and there are moments when only one is true, and there are moments when the other is true.

Tess Callahan: 40:41

Yeah, it's like electrons appearing and disappearing.

Ayad Akhtar: 40:46

Yeah.

Tess Callahan: 40:47

So yeah, to me, the book seems as much about radiance, or I mean, you could say enlightenment as it seems as much about that as it does about incarnation. It's as much about up and out as it is in and down.

Ayad Akhtar: 41:05

Wow, beautiful!

Tess Callahan: 41:07

Especially as the you know the the book comes the full arc of the book expansion and contraction. Yeah, you know it's a polar planet, right? So these things don't. The compass

Ayad Akhtar: 41:19

of religious experience contains both.

Tess Callahan: 41:21

Yes,

Ayad Akhtar: 41:22

Jonathan Edwards, to come back to one of our great spiritual geniuses in the American tradition, was the presiding personality over the New England Awakening, which resulted in this extraordinary sort of like profusion of religious experience. People having profound religious experiences, which were then almost systematically and without exception followed by terrible depressions. You know, the book the book has this episode, this scene in which, late in the book, the narrator recounts meeting the great Sufi singer Nusrat Fatihan when he was a much younger man, which which I did encounter him as a younger man in Italy, and and a discourse around what Nusra Fatih Li Khan is talking about when he gets into a state where the music is carrying him to something he gets very close to gets so close that when it's over, there's this extraordinary sadness, this bereftness. Yeah, and that that bereftness is something that he says. You know, he would he used to say, and his father actually talked quite about it. Quite a bit about this. Is it's a necessary condition. It is. It is. It's a different form. It's the result of closeness to what the narrator will not name, but what they name as God. But the narrator narrator does not use that language.

Tess Callahan: 42:53

Yeah, that scene was so moving to me. Really, it is. It is.

Ayad Akhtar: 42:57

It's impossibly moving. Yeah, it

Tess Callahan: 42:59

reminds me of the in the Christian tradition that the Gospels, the Transfiguration of Jesus goes up to the top of the mountain, the sky is open, you know this is my beloved Son. Then the apostles are fall; they fall down. Interestingly, right? They fall, and then they scramble to their feet, and they're like, "Oh, let's build a tent. Let's, yeah, we have to like. And Jesus is like, what? No, we're not building a tent. We're going. What are you talking about? We're going back down the mountain, and they're like, you can feel the the inner dissonance there. Like, what do you mean we're going back down the mountain?

Ayad Akhtar: 43:39

Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 43:40

yeah.

Ayad Akhtar: 43:41

It's a mainstay of all of these, you know, remarkable parables and stories of, I mean, what attainment, whatever we want to call it. You know, I thought a lot about Plato for this book. Plato's all over this book in ways spoken and unspoken. You know, the book is also a meditation on the Symposium on the idea of love and various forms of love, and you know he has that extraordinary metaphor in in the in the Republic where there is a seeker who figures out that there's a there's light coming from behind and then goes out and sees the sun, but Plato too has that seeker come back down to the cave.

Tess Callahan: 44:20

Yeah,

Ayad Akhtar: 44:21

so I think that movement of to something and then back. It was important that the book embody that. Yes, that was that was the full arc of the of right.

Tess Callahan: 44:32

Yes, yes, that was very satisfying. Although you know, as a reader, like you do want to stay on the top. You want to build a tent. Let's just build the tent here.

Ayad Akhtar: 44:46

The weather's great up here.

Tess Callahan: 44:52

So we haven't talked about the setting. So if you think of setting as like the nest into which you put the eggs,

Ayad Akhtar: 44:59

yeah.

Tess Callahan: 45:00

And the story will hatch. This is a divided campus in a literally divided town.

Ayad Akhtar: 45:06

Yeah.

Tess Callahan: 45:07

So I was wondering if you could talk about why this is the perfect nest for this particular story for this experience that Ayotte has.

Ayad Akhtar: 45:16

The the experience that he has of of radiance, for lack of a better way of putting it, opens onto much larger questions about, as we said earlier, origin and consciousness and meaning and symmetry, things that really are just beyond the capacity I think of the human mind to really fully answer. Certainly, rational. Certainly the rational mind. If by rational we mean the irrational, small rational. And what better place? I mean, in a way, it seems like college, at least within our sort of tradition, is the place that young people are supposed to ask questions like that if they're going to ask any questions, that's the place to wonder about what are we all doing here. That's the place to confront, be confronted, as Plato's sort of characters are by Socrates, by the fundamental questions that will shape their lives. Because so many of those interlocutors with Socrates are young people in those dialogs. Socrates is trying to get their minds to be engaged with the more fundamental questions. That academy, that first academy, that first gathering by the tree, the Platonic academy is what you know that word academy comes from. It's what's where it's where the whole idea of higher education comes from. So, I wanted to set this experience, which was opening onto very large questions, in the place where it was rightful for them to be asked, and yet maybe to also stage the ways in which you couldn't ask them today. What happens when you are at a place where the questions you want to ask can't be asked.

Tess Callahan: 47:06

Yeah.

Ayad Akhtar: 47:07

So that was an interesting conundrum, dramatic situation. As a dramatist, I'm interested in drama. So that was an interesting dramatic situation. And then similarly, you know, within the context of contradiction, paradox, and warring haves, if you will, if you you have in the symposium you have round souls who've been cut in half looking for their other halves, and in the radiance in this book you have a narrator who's split down the middle left and right. I mean, there's all this axial split stuff going on, and he's so halves coming together. Whether there are two halves of a town or there are opposing political points of view, can they coexist? Can can they coexist? Is there a way in which there is a higher unity to all of this? And again, I don't think the book has. I don't think it answers any of these questions. But hopefully, it doesn't answer them in satisfying ways.

Tess Callahan: 48:05

Definitely, I mean, having the question live inside you is everything, right?

Ayad Akhtar: 48:11

Beautiful Tess. That's that's right. I feel like I feel like living proximity to the unknown is its own form of knowledge.

Tess Callahan: 48:18

Oh wow! Yeah. All right. Let me ask you about the story. is bookended by these two conversations that Ed has with his cousin.

Ayad Akhtar: 48:28

Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 48:29

and in those conversations, a family secret is revealed in two parts.

Ayad Akhtar: 48:35

Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 48:36

and it's so powerful. And over the course of the novel, we begin to see how. I don't. I want to. I want to phrase this without giving anything away. But an experience that Ed's father had long before Ed was born somehow is living unspoken but felt inside Ed's body, particularly on one half of his body,

Ayad Akhtar: 49:05

yeah,

Tess Callahan: 49:05

and it comes into awareness when he's in this state of radiance,

Ayad Akhtar: 49:11

yeah.

Tess Callahan: 49:11

And so I wanted to ask you about this idea of epigenetics, ancestral trauma, the way energies, individual and collective, like live in

Ayad Akhtar: 49:22

us, yeah,

Tess Callahan: 49:23

subterraneally, yeah, and what happens when they surface? You know,

Ayad Akhtar: 49:30

Tess. I mean, the question is so beautifully articulated. I'm not sure there's an answer. You've answered the question in asking it as beautifully as you have. I wanted to represent the rich braid of experience, personal, collective, and the way in which our, as you said, what we we what our forebears have lived lives on in us, unknown unknown to us in. Many ways shaping us in many ways. I wanted to depict all of that without there being a without reducing any aspect of the experience to any one thing, because I think our lives are made of these these multitudes, these pluralities that that move us, and what the ordering logic of it is is not necessarily a category. It isn't a category. It is a set of influences that we live, that we fulfill. Whether they're sociological, whether they're linguistic, whether they're aspirational, whether they're ancestral, whether they're transcendent, all of those things are moving through us in ways that we can't untangle. We can't untangle them. It's just what we are. So the familial piece of it was so essential to articulate the continuity. It's the continuity. It's like my life. I don't exist but for those who came before me. I am the continuation of those who came before me, and maybe in ways that I don't even understand. Maybe in ways that that I think I know, and I think in a 21st century where my disaggregated consciousness seems to me to be a separate thing from other things. That in fact I'm not really that separate, both from that which I come from, but also from that which I'm around, and which is around me.

Tess Callahan: 51:32

Yeah.

Ayad Akhtar: 51:33

So articulating that overlap, the overlapping. I can't remember as a wonderful thinker. I'm blanking on who it is. Talk about the inter interbeing. I think it's a Buddhist idea.

Tess Callahan: 51:44

I think it's Tiknahan.

Ayad Akhtar: 51:45

Tiknahan. Right there. You go. Right. That's right. Interbeing. What is the what is our interbeingness, and my interbeingness with the familial field, but also my interbeingness with the American consciousness and the local consciousness of my community. How are all of those things actually shaping the experience of the narrator, shaping the experience of the reader, shaping our destiny as a nation, shaping our individual destinies? You know, it's it's a big it's big stuff. But you know, look, I I knew I didn't have to answer as long as they ask the question in really compelling ways.

Tess Callahan: 52:27

You ask the question, and you also give us an experience of interbeing,

Ayad Akhtar: 52:31

yeah, through

Tess Callahan: 52:32

Ayat's experience, which is really profoundly moving. I found. So, last question. You know, it's funny that we have not talked yet about the character that's mentioned in the first line of the book, and who you know is important throughout Lucy. So there are two, there are two very charismatic, wonderfully flawed, fascinating characters in this novel, one on stage, Lucy, and one off stage, Ed's father.

Ayad Akhtar: 53:05

Yeah,

Tess Callahan: 53:06

and I wanted to ask, what your what you think constitutes greatness in a person?

Ayad Akhtar: 53:14

Right. What a question! Wow. In the book, the narrator describes the experience of being around Lucy, the way one of Orson Welles's editors described being around Orson Welles, which was that when he would come into the room, the kinds of thoughts you thought were just different. He somehow changed the air in a way that you experienced yourself as differently, not because he was doing anything to you, but just because he was there. There's an expansiveness. There's a palpable expansiveness, and an enlargement of the experience of being me, or not me, as as it were, that certain people can initiate just by being there. I don't know what that is. You know, Carl Jung, I think, used to call it some kind of mana Personality and charisma is another thing, but it's kind of an overused word that is not precise enough. Aristotle has a beautiful thing he says about magnanimity: that there are those who are more magnanimous than the rest of us, and they are cut from a different kind of both aspiration and yearning to accomplish, and they have they have what he calls greatness. It's hard to put your finger on it. You know, it's it's like that thing the Supreme Court once said about obscenity. You know, you know it when you see it. It can be abused, of course. In fact, me. The people who, who have it, don't seem to know how to do anything but abuse it. It's hard to say, but it but it certainly in the book is decisive for this narrator and decisive for his experience. It's a real apprenticeship or a learning in a kind of different order of of being. I remember. reading Henry the Fourth parts one and two for the first time when I was in my very early 30s, and I came across this character Falstaff, and he was so alive on the page. I don't know that I'd ever experienced a character that alive. I loved the play. I fell in love with the plays so much, I just kept reading and rereading because of this guy Falstaff, and of course I realized on my first reading this guy's a lot like my dad. But Falstaff, you know, famously, you know, for many critics, the greatest character that Shakespeare ever wrote, the most abundant, the one who stands in for life itself, who is a nobleman, but also a thief, and a scoundrel, and a cheat, but also made of surpassing, surpassing stuff, and can and can mimic the king in a bar, and be more of a king in his mimicry of being a king in a bar than the king who's the king at the center of the play. Yeah. So Lucy, Falstaff, my dad-you

Tess Callahan: 56:33

know-it's fascinating that they're all extraordinarily paradoxical characters, right? It's not about niceness, that's for sure, but they're all like each of those are the fullest versions of themselves.

Ayad Akhtar: 56:47

Yeah. Well, that's being nice is great, but that's not what we're talking about.

Tess Callahan: 56:55

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, I could I could ask you questions all day, and but I want to respect your time. And is there anything that you would like to say about the book that I haven't touched on in my questions?

Ayad Akhtar: 57:11

No, I mean I I feel like you you said so much more than I imagined possible. So I'm flattered and and honored and and very grateful actually for this conversation. So thank you.

Tess Callahan: 57:25

I was deeply deeply moved by the book, and yeah, I wish you all the best with it. And I think it's I think it is a book for our time, and if it can evoke in the reader the experience it's describing, that's extraordinary, and it did for me.

Ayad Akhtar: 57:44

Thank you, Tess.

Tess Callahan: 57:45

Yeah, thank you, Ad. And I will I will put your website into the show notes. And is there any other way people can follow you that you'd like to mention?

Ayad Akhtar: 57:55

No, I'm not on social media, but I the book is out on September 29, and I'm going. I'm doing a pretty extensive book tour. I'm going to 28 cities around the country. So most of the dates are posted on my website, but all dates, all of the dates will be there at some point. Great.

Tess Callahan: 58:14

Maybe I'll catch you on tour.

Ayad Akhtar: 58:15

Where where are you based?

Tess Callahan: 58:17

I'm in outside New York City, in New Jersey. Yeah,

Ayad Akhtar: 58:20

doing three events in New York. Okay,

Tess Callahan: 58:22

great. Well, thank you so much for your time and your generosity, and for bringing a beautiful book into the world. And I can't wait to see what comes next from you.

Ayad Akhtar: 58:32

Thank you, Tess.

Tess Callahan: 58:37

That's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please help spread the word. Follow us, review us, give us five stars on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to our Writers at the Well Substack, where we offer short written interviews with authors on similar topics. Huge thanks to Christopher Lloyd Clarke for the intro and outro music, and to Eric Fisher for his ever patient and often miraculous audio engineering. And thank you for listening. See you next time.