Danny Ramadan is a Lambda-award winning Syrian-Canadian author. His novels, The Clothesline Swing and The Foghorn Echoes continue to receive accolades. His award-winning children’s books The Salma Series continues to grow. Ramadan has raised over $300,000 for LGBTQ+ refugees. His memoir, Crooked Teeth, came out in the summer of 2024.
“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.
Interview by Nancy Pearson
Nancy Pearson (NP): Memoir writing is so different from that of fiction, and you do something unusual with Crooked Teeth at the start when you say that “writing fiction is much safer, and it’s better for my mental health… But where,” you ask, can a writer “hide in the pages of a memoir? How to escape when the words are my face, the ink is my blood, the paper is my skin?” Can you talk a bit about how you managed to break through those barriers to keep pen to paper during the years you spent writing your memoir?
Danny Ramadan (DR): I think that it was a big challenge for me to be able to tell the story where I balance my desire as a fiction writer who wants to tell you a good story with opening belief systems, and an inciting incident, and a narrative evolvement, and all of that. It was very difficult for me to tell you a story that doesn’t feel that it has that drive because it’s real life and real life does not imitate life that way. So, I had to think about it in a trilogy of ways. I have my author self, who’s driven to tell you a good story, like a fictional book, like a novel. And I have my personal self—it’s the person who has his defenses up. He has his defense mechanisms and triggers his insecurities about telling this story. But also, he has his wisdoms that he’s filtering this story through. And he has his ways of understanding his own past. And then you have the past self, the subject of the book, right? And that past self is unobtainable, really, because that past self only lives in memory and memory is fallible by the finish. So, trying to find a balance between those three personas that would allow the book to exist as a by-product of the three of them merging is how I managed to break through to the book where I would think about who I am as a human being and then think about who that person used to be ages ago. And then think about that as a narrative from point A to point B. A big part of that meant that I needed to pick and choose stories that will go into one big narrative that would allow the story to evolve and allow the human to move forward, just like a character’s evolvement in a novel. A big part of that is that I also had to break away and have a conversation directly with the reader because a lot of times the storyteller has to stop and the actual author has to step in and be like, “Yah, this is what’s going on here. This is what I need you to do here with me for this story to work.”
NP: That actually flows into my next question. At the outset you do something else unusual: you draw the reader in by speaking directly to us, by establishing a relationship of trust to let us know that you’re a reliable narrator. At different points you speak again to the reader, breaking through the fourth wall to remind us that you are trusting us, and we can trust you. These are important reminders and the relationship between writer and reader grows, evolves as you take us into your life, your world. The reminders are each a point of pause and reflection. My thoughts when I read these were that you might also be reminding yourself to trust yourself as the memoir writer, as the person who lived through these experiences. Is that a fair understanding?
DR: That’s absolutely a fair understanding, I would say. The breaking of the fourth wall was the only way for me to be able to have that conversation with the reader because, when I wrote the first draft of the book, it was just a narrative. It was just a big story. I didn’t hide anything. I just continued to speak and tell exactly what happened. And that book sent me back to therapy. That book was difficult to write and even more difficult to read after. It did not sit well with me. And then the second draft was mainly just me talking directly to the reader. The second draft was mainly me breaking the fourth wall and never repairing it again. I was just talking at you and talking about how impossible it is to be a memoirist and also a queer person, also a refugee person, and also a person of colour. Because at the end of the day, the only currency I have is my trauma and I don’t feel comfortable just giving you the trauma and why do you think this trauma is delicious and why it’s important to you. And when I finished reading that draft, I realized that it’s not fair to you as the reader. It just assumes so much about who you are as the reader and it’s not fair as a book to you to begin with. The third draft was the one that ended up balancing the two: a draft that allows me to tell parts of the story, as well as to set boundaries with the reader, like a good friend would do, right? And accept that in certain places you’re telling this story and in other places you’re not, and that’s okay.
NP: With that in mind, my next question might be a little bit redundant… As your memoir moves forward, it seemed to me that your voice gains strength, particularly when you speak of your time in prison. You set a limit and a boundary to how much you will and can tell. It feels like a turning point in that part of the book. You ask the reader to “trust my silence as you’ve trusted my voice.” My heart cracked open more there, Danny, because your silence echoed with deep pain and suffering. What I wonder is how you were able to determine just how much to share, how to draw the line and move forward?
DR: Oh gosh, I hate that chapter! The problem with that chapter is that I wrote it like forty times. That chapter grew to 20,000 words and dropped down to a thousand words. It kept moving up and down like an accordion. I just couldn’t control it. It was a big challenge, to be honest. And I’m not even sure that it is the right place to build the boundary. I was quite aware that this is a book that is going to live on the shelves of people for today but also for twenty years from now. People are going to read this book, hopefully, until time immemorial. So how comfortable I am right now with how much in the book I shared. And not only that but how comfortable my future self is going to be with how much I shared in the book, as well. I don’t know the answer to that question, to be honest. I don’t know if that boundary was ever made solid. I don’t know if it exists in a way that protects me. It does now. I feel protected at the moment, but is it going to protect me a year from now? Ten years? Five years? Am I going to feel like I was too self-protective ten years from now? Or am I going to feel like I blabbered too much? I’m not sure. I guess we’ll just find out.
NP: So, my last question, I hope is a little bit easier. You say that writing memoir “feels like a disloyalty to ‘your fiction,’ which has served as [your] shield for two decades now.” Does it feel that way now that your memoir is out in the world?
DR: There is a point where you, as the artist, divorce yourself from the book and it becomes a piece of art. There is a point when that art does not feel like the heart deliverance that it was. I definitely have yoyo-ed between feeling that I have shared way too much and feeling that I have created a beautiful piece of art when I hear feedback from people that they enjoyed the book. That means a lot to me when I hear that it resonated with people, that it made an impact. It means a lot to me, and I see it as the piece of art that it is. And then when I listen to myself lately doing the audio (I recorded the audio for the book)—after I heard it, I had such self-doubt, such self-criticism over my accent and my voice and the way that I told the story and the way that I acted up here. So, I guess, I hate to give you half answers, I really do, but at the end of the day this question is also answered with: I don’t know. I’m not in a place right now where I can give you a solid answer to that. And I think that, if anything, this is the whole essence of the book. The essence of the book is to keep you in the gray area. The essence of the book is to give you space to read the art and reflect upon that, and allow yourself to be fluid in the way that you think about the topics that I brought in.
NP: Right. There’s definitely a lot to think about after reading it. Crooked Teeth is a real accomplishment.