This week, NPR correspondent Aarti Shahani discusses her memoir Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares with fellow NPR correspondent Sonari Rhodes Glinton. This conversation was recorded live at the American Writers Museum in October 2019.
This program was the first in a series of programs presented in conjunction with our special exhibit My America: Immigrant and Refugee Writers Today, which you can explore virtually at My-America.org
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EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
“The book is literally my heart on a page.”
“And so relative to what my mother had seen before in the many countries she lived in as a lifelong migrant, she saw in America people can actually talk to each other without pulling machetes and women can have a voice.”
“You can recount facts but I think the truth of it is the significance…so the tools of journalism are there, but the blessing of being a writer is you get to delve into the deeper truth.”
“Journalism was my escape from being an immigrant daughter. A lot of us escape what we come from, in subtle ways and dramatic ways.”
“We all have inside of us, something that glows. And sometimes you pay attention to it and you lift it up and you shine it and you cultivate it and you find out what to do with it. And sometimes you ignore it because often it’s out of fear.”