Interview with a First Novelist: Patricia McArdle

Patricia McArdle and her daughter Sabrina.

How do you feel when someone you know publishes a novel? For aspirational fiction writers like me, this moment can generate a complex churning of emotion. On the one hand, you think, Wow, if she can do it, I can do it. And then you think, So why aren’t you finishing that novel in the drawer right now?

Next week Patricia McArdle, a former colleague of mine in the State Department, will publish her first novel, Farishta, a story that relies heavily on her real-life tour of duty with a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. The story of how she came to write this novel and then to win the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award is about as inspirational as novelists’ back stories get.

Afghan children gather firewood.

I haven’t read the novel yet (my wife grabbed our advance copy when it arrived and is reading it now), but I did read the extensive excerpt that appeared online in the Amazon contest last year. There are some big themes threaded through the novel – the culture clash of women and male-centric Afghan mores, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and the importance of solar cook stoves – but what struck me immediately in the first chapter, when a Foreign Service Officer gets her hext assignment, is the accuracy with which the author portrays the Great State Department Assignment Game.

Patricia McArdle is a retired Foreign Service Officer who previously served in the Peace Corps and as a U.S. Naval Officer. She’s graciously agreed to an interview about how this novel came to be written.

Did you plan to write novel about Afghanistan when you took the assignment, or did the idea arise in country or even after your tour ended?

A few months before I left the U.S. for my tour of duty in Afghanistan, two good friends did urge me to write about my experiences.  When I got there I really just wanted to make it through the assignment without getting killed or injured.  I’ve always kept journals, however and I did record my impressions almost daily but with no specific plans to share what I had written with anyone but family and friends. 

A few months after I came back to the U.S., I found myself inexplicably overwhelmed by what I had seen and experienced in Afghanistan.  I began to review my journals and considered writing a non-fiction account of my impressions as my friends has suggested.  In the end I decided that that a compelling work of fiction might allow me to reach many people who would never consider reading a memoir about America’s longest war.  I had no idea if I could actually write a novel, but I thought I’d give it a try.

How much distance did you have on your real-life experience in Afghanistan before you began writing Farishta?

I worked for one more year at the Department of State before I took early retirement.  With my Peace Corps, Navy and diplomatic service I had more than 30 years on the books and so I decided it was time to move on.  As soon as I retired, I went out and bought five books on writing the novel and spent the next few months reading them cover-to-cover while I reviewed my journals. 

To what extent are there autobiographical elements in the novel?  What’s the overlap between you and your protagonist, Angela Morgan?

Angela Morgan is a totally fictional character, but there is a lot of my personality in Angela. I drew on my own experiences and those of other female diplomats and journalists working in Afghanistan to create her story.  The PTSD that weighs heavily on Angela came from several sources.  When I returned from Afghanistan, I was actually afraid for several months to take my dog for a walk after dark in my very safe, well-lit Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood. When I finally admitted to myself that I did have a ‘little’ problem, I began to wonder what it must be like for soldiers and civilians who had endured real violence and suffered actual casualties.  I have lost several Foreign Service friends to terrorist bombs and have just missed a few myself, but I’ve been lucky.  I wanted to explore the effects of this type of wartime trauma in my novel.

Why a first-person narrator over a perhaps more conventional third-person narrator?

The late novelist Tony Hillerman, Patricia McArdle's writing mentor.

I used the first-person narration for several reasons.  I’ve been writing in my journals for so long that I am very comfortable with the first person.  Also I have published two short stories, which were written in the first person.  The first was penned while I was a student at the University of New Mexico.  My journalism professor, Tony Hillerman, who left UNM to become the renowned writer of Navajo detective novels, urged me to take at least one fiction writing course before I graduated. 

When I signed up for the class Tony had recommended, our instructor insisted we write something that would actually get published.  She assured her students that the easiest type of short fiction to sell was a formulaic true confession story. It was the early seventies and the newsstands were full of magazines like True Story and True Romance.   She promised that after we read a few from cover to cover, the formula would jump right off the page.  She was right.  I came up with a story about a young, innocent teenager who joins a hippie commune in New Mexico after her boyfriend is missing in action in Vietnam.  I sold it for $250.  My second short story was based on an incident that occurred when I took the Foreign Service exam for the first time while I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay.  That story won first place in the 2009 Foreign Service Journal annual short story contest.

THIS INTERVIEW CONTINUES TOMORROW AT 317am.