[music] i'm anne boccock and welcome to between the covers summer series with me is diana abu jabar and she is the award-winning author of seven books her latest is a novel fencing with the king diana hi and the last time that we talked it was your memoir it was life without a recipe which is a family story well now we have a novel and this is also about a family give me a quick look at what this is well uh fencing with the king is a kind of family story even though it's fiction it has a starting place in my family's background my father was an immigrant to this country and he used to fence with king hussein and i got the idea that it would be really kind of a cool thing to explore a what if what if an immigrant to this country who used to fence with the king got an invitation to do a rematch and the the gist of the story follows the idea of this immigrant and his daughter returning to the old country basically so the daughter can discover her own heritage and her own cultural upbringing and a mysterious letter from her grandmother so it's all wrapped up in this kind of investigation and and the story of the fencing match gets played out um toward the end of the novel i like how you just slip in there that you have a family member that was fencing with king hussein this story you talk about the granddaughter uncovering a secret and this is a with a grandmother that she knew nothing about i'm curious is there somehow a connection to your own grandmother perhaps very much so um i never knew my maternal grandmother and i'm sorry my paternal grandmother she died before i was born but i had this experience one day when i was back in jordan i was visiting some of the crusader castles out in the desert and one of the bedouin who was a caretaker came up to me out of the blue looked straight at me and said anissa and that was my grandmother's name and i became very interested in this idea of whether you can have a relationship with someone who is no longer there someone you've never actually met in person and that became the mystery that amani has to solve in fencing with the king she finds a letter from her grandmother and she wants to find out who is this person what did this letter mean um and she has to track down her her connection to her grandmother through a series of mysteries that she uncovers while traveling around jordan well you may have just answered this but what surprised you most in your research was it the fencing connection was it that you looked like your grandmother there were so many surprises in this novel um i didn't know that my father even knew how to fence much less that he fenced with king hussein i didn't know that my grandmother was such a thinker and a writer that she wrote poetry and in the novel amani discovers a man in a cave and that was one of my biggest discoveries in my own life i discovered that i had a relative who the family had sort of hidden away and i don't want to give too many spoilers i'll just say that the man in the cave in large part was inspired by the discovery of a missing relative and that was a huge uh surprise is probably an understatement for me yeah well in this book i i have to say the research must have been fantastic i want to know diana is there one particular thing that you want readers to take away from fencing with the king well i i really am interested in having as much exploration as possible into a wonderful wide diversity of stories and voices and i feel like we're opening up to all kinds of different perspectives now i'd love to see more of the arab and arab american experience in our mainstream i feel like it's so important this story is in large part about the development of the peace process largely through the middle east with israel and what that looked like i'm really hoping that people will connect with this idea of looking at our ancestry as a way of understanding who we are and how we can connect with each other to better go forward toward peace well i i will say that the book takes place in the 90s if i am correct in jordan a part of i guess history literature that we don't normally read about correct it's really true i was shocked actually the other day i saw that my novel had been listed under the shelf of historical fiction you know i remember the 90s very well and so a lot of the experiences of amani who goes to jordan when she's 30 years old they are very much a reflection of my own experiences of going to jordan in the 1990s but it's also tied to that political era when the madrid accords and the oslo peace accords were underway and things were really looking very exciting and very rich and fresh in the region so it is very much a piece of that time well the book is fencing with the king and i'd like to just switch gears for a little bit and do a lightning round about you the author i want to know first what's the craziest job you ever had before you were an author oh that's that's a great question um it might be i shouldn't admit to this but i was for one year i was miss oswego i won one of these pageants um because i needed money for college and i thought i could win the the third place which was 300 but i i accidentally won first place and for a year i had to go to fishing tournaments and hold up fish and shake hands at ribbon cutting ceremonies and ride in sun roofs and cars on parade and pageant queen things so i'm going to remember that for the next time that i interview you and instead of award-winning author of its pageant girl all the way i would like to know on your bucket list what would be the vacation spot i have never been to venice and that is something that i have wanted to go for years and i'm actually writing my next book set in venice so i have to go there oh if you need a research assistant i i'm your girl another question all mothers i know that all mothers have super powers but if you could have any superpower what would it be oh gosh well you know i'm constantly telling my daughter that i have eyes in the back of my head um but i personally i think it would be really cool to be able to fly that would be my big vote to be able to fly anywhere like to feminist perhaps and uh you know have instant vacations without having to sit in um you know a coach and i know you're a great cook so on days that you don't want to cook what's your go-to food oh gosh um i think it's probably pizza that we've got a great pizza place down the road from us and uh we can walk there and i've actually been thinking about going there today and my last question the best guidance that you were ever given by your family oh gosh well um let's see i would have to say that it was my mother she saw that i was really struggling with my first memoir the language of baklava because i didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings and my mom finally said to me um you know i know you don't want to upset anyone but at the end of the day you know what i say about the family i say the heck with the family actually she didn't use that word she used a more zesty word but um she told me to go ahead and tell my story that my story belongs to me and it was a great moment of being given permission by a really important person in my life great advice from your mother diana thank you so much the book is fencing with the king thanks again thank you anne i'll see you on the next between the covers [music]