Fear and Sanctuary in We Are All We Have by Marina Budhos

In her article about the writing of her latest YA novel, Marina Budhos relates how she found the courage to find its writing path. See Marina’s 2019 guest post on mentoring.

Excerpt:

There is no doubt I could have deepened and tightened, found a way to write an evocative novel that captured the helpless experience of sanctuary. But I had to face the truth: I was bored. I was treading in a tone, a territory, that reminded me of an earlier novel I’d published. Most of all I didn’t want to write a novel that replicated the muted passivity of that period. I wanted out.

What she found was that her Pakistani American character, teenaged Rania, was getting lost in the poesy of a concept. So she decided to write a road novel, “where the quest for safety, for sanctuary, would drive the book.”

The road itself provided momentum. Rania’s fierce character took hold through the writing of a single passage. What she had to deepen, she says, was Rania’s growth. Watching the movement toward trust and working my way through the themes of truth and lying, I can see how this might have played out. Rania talks about “disappearing into the holes and crevices of this country.”

It’s the world of children coming into shelters, each bringing a story, each bringing a life, each fighting a system that renders them inanimate, that comes through in the vibrant voice and the interweaving stories in this book.

Marina writes what happened when she set aside her first version of this story and set it on the road:

The safety brake was let go, and I propelled forward—as my character did—grabbing the same thematic threads of sanctuary and survival, even the backstory of political journalism—but allowing me, the writer, to race forward and be surprised, not sure what lay around the next bend.

Maybe that’s the big takeaway from the origin story of this novel—to lean into fear and uncertainty and let the story leap ahead. Budhos (author of Ask Me No Questions, The Long Ride and other titles , co-author of the eye-opening nonfiction work, Sugar Changed the World) caught my attention with her very first novel, The Professor of Light.

In We Are All We Have, Budhos turns to borders, politics, and their impact on the lives of young people, through one girl’s search for survival and for a way to create a self and a home.