The Alterations Lady
An Afghan Refugee, an American, and the Stories that Define Us
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Two women. One exhilarating story of displacement and perseverance in the face of extremism. What happens when we take the time to listen?
When the journalist Cindy Miller met Lailoma Shahwali, who was altering her daughter’s wedding dress, she assumed their interactions would be brief. But in Lailoma she found not just a seamstress, but a survivor who would open up about her remarkable experiences in her native Afghanistan. In recollections shared over warm tea with cardamom, frozen walnuts, and mulberries, Lailoma offers both an entry into a colorful pre-Taliban Afghanistan, where, despite being a girl, she pursued an education and worked toward becoming a doctor, as well as a stark portrait of what came next, when the Taliban seized her beloved country, stripped her of her hard-won rights, terrorized her family, and brutally murdered her husband.
A breathtaking account of triumph against all odds, Lailoma’s fight to protect her young son and support her family takes them on a dangerous mountain escape into Pakistan and then to the United States in search of sanctuary and opportunity. Here, her navigation of a complicated immigration system and her pursuit of the elusive American dream is both highly personal and a timeless account of the experiences of refugees everywhere. Beautifully detailed and strikingly told, The Alterations Lady is a poignant reminder of the possibilities offered by a nation of immigrants and a call to hear the stories of our neighbors, the unsung heroes we interact with every day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Afghan woman's journey from her war-torn homeland to life as "an alterations lady to the wealthiest women" in Scottsdale, Ariz., is recapped in this evocative if flawed debut from journalist Miller. Lailoma Shahwali grew up in Kabul during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s and the country's civil wars in the '90s. She experienced violence firsthand, including surviving the Taliban's 1996 bombing campaign against Kabul, recollections of which open the narrative with gruesome lyricism: "The stench of blood pervaded the air. Sometimes she found a body part, but knowing who it belonged to was often hard to tell." That same year, Shahwali witnessed the murder of her husband by the Taliban. Miller's account, while sumptuously written, has oddities in its approach. Among them is that framing Shahwali as an everywoman feels disingenuous, given that her husband was "a highly placed general" in the Soviet-backed government; and that Miller can come off as condescending in the way she handles profiling someone she met working in a customer service role (Miller frequents the Neiman Marcus where Shahwali works). For example, after the opening bombing scene, Miller pivots to an account of Shahwali winning an employee-of-the-year award, presenting it as an almost equally emotional moment ("Lailoma's heart thundered in her chest, and she realized she was holding her breath"). This falls short of the mark.
