Excerpt from Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A Chronology of the Events

1964–68 My parents meet in Lahore, Pakistan; marry; immigrate to the United States

1972 I am born on Staten Island

1976 We move to Wisconsin

1979 Iran hostage crisis; Mother's first bout with cancer (with recurrences in '86, '99, and 2010)

1982 Father's first attempt at private practice

1991 Father's private practice folds; he declares bankruptcy, returns to academic medicine

1993 Father first meets Donald Trump

1994 Dinner with Aunt Asma; reading Rushdie

1997 Father's final encounter with Trump

1998 Latif Awan killed in Pakistan

2001 The attacks of September 11

2008 Family trip to Abbottabad, Pakistan

2009 Car breaks down in Scranton

2011 Bin Laden killed

2012 First opening of a play in New York City; meet Riaz Rind; Christine Langford and her unborn child die

2013 Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Drama

2014 Join the board of the Riaz Rind Foundation; meet Asha

2015 Diagnosed with syphilis; Mother dies; Trump declares his candidacy

2016 Trump elected

2017 Sell my shares in Timur Capital; Merchant of Debt opens in Chicago; Father tried for malpractice

2018 I begin to write these pages

Family Politics


I.

On the Anniversary of Trump's First Year in Office

My father first met Donald Trump in the early '90s, when they were both in their midforties—my father the elder by a year—and as each was coming out from under virtual financial ruin. Trump's unruly penchant for debt and his troubles with borrowed money were widely reported in the business pages of the time: by 1990, his namesake organization was collapsing under the burden of the loans he'd taken out to keep his casinos running, the Plaza Hotel open, and his airline's jets aloft. The money had come at a price. He'd been forced to guarantee a portion of it, leaving him personally liable for more than eight hundred million dollars. In the summer of that year, a long Vanity Fair profile painted an alarming portrait not only of the man's finances but also of his mental state. Separated from his wife, he'd decamped from the family triplex for a small apartment on a lower floor of Trump Tower. He was spending hours a day lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. He wouldn't leave the building, not for meetings, not for meals—subsisting on a diet of burgers and fries delivered from a local deli. Like his debt load, Trump's waistline ballooned, his hair grew long, curling at the ends, ungovernable. And it wasn't just his appearance. He'd gone uncharacteristically quiet. Ivana confided to friends she was worried. She'd never seen him like this, and she wasn't sure he was going to pull through.

My father, like Trump, binged on debt in the '80s and ended the decade uncertain about his financial future. A doctor, he'd transitioned into private practice from a career in academic cardiology just as the hostage crisis began. By the time Reagan was in office, he'd started to mint money, as he liked to put it. (The playful attack of his Punjabi lilt always made it sound to me more like he was describing the flavor of all that new cash rather than the activity of making it.) In 1983, with more money than he knew what to do with, Father took a weekend seminar in real estate investment at the Radisson hotel in West Allis, Wisconsin. By Sunday night, he'd put in an offer on his first property, a listing one of the instructors had "shared" with the participants on a lunch break—a gas station in Baraboo just blocks from the site where the Ringling brothers started their circus. Just what it was he needed with a gas station was the perfectly reasonable question my mother flatly posed when he announced the news to us later that week. To celebrate, he'd mixed a pitcher of Rooh Afza lassi—the rose-flavored squash beverage was my mother's favorite. He shrugged in response to her question and held out a glass for her to take. She was in no mood for lassi.

Excerpted from Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. Copyright © 2020 by Ayad Akhtar. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.