Omar El Akkad didn’t think his memoir would ever be published

Calling all bookworms! Welcome to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter.

I’m Meg. I write “shut up and read,” a book newsletter. I’m also on BookTok. This week, we speak with Egyptian Canadian journalist-turned-author Omar El Akkad, whose memoir-manifesto “One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This” came out on Feb. 25. We also look at recent news in the literary world before checking in with North Figueroa Bookshop.

When the world doesn’t make sense to El Akkad, he writes. In late October 2023, El Akkad started to sketch out his feelings about the bombardment of Gaza, and “what it means to be someone like me living in this part of the world,” meaning someone who was born in Cairo, grew up in Doha, moved to Canada and now lives in rural Oregon — far from Palestine. By November, his editor encouraged him to start writing about it. The result was his nonfiction debut, which grapples with the empty promises of the West and his crumbling faith in its institutions as the Palestinian death toll rises. “I didn’t think it would get much traction at all,” says El Akkad, calling the buzz surrounding his book “very surprising.”

“My suspicion is that if it’s gained any traction, it’s been because there is so much anger that I think has been bubbling up over the last year and a half, and this appears as a site for the venting of that anger,” he tells The Times.

El Akkad has encountered both sides of that anger in the early days of his press tour, “from some of the most thoughtful conversations that I’ve ever had around books and literature to some of the most antagonistic, combative, dismissive questioning sessions — and everything in between,” he says of his U.K. and Ireland tour. “I guess that comes with the territory for a book like this.”

Below, read our Q&A with the author, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Who did you write this book for?

I genuinely don’t know. I was trying to contend with a sense of deep uncertainty relative to my own position here because I’m someone who, from a very young age, was oriented towards the West. … It’s the reason for so much of who I am. And then to be in this situation over the last year and a half of feeling completely unanchored from that leaves me in a place where I don’t know who I am anymore. So I wasn’t really thinking about somebody else, but I can say that almost all of the most passionate responses to this book, and I’m not saying good or bad, have come from people who have a similar sense of being unanchored.

So many lines and passages stuck out to me, but I felt as though the following about the current state of U.S. politics summed up a sentiment that is shared by many. You write, “One remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name onto the side of a bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.” I’m curious what you think the Democratic Party is making of November’s election and where you think they’ll go from here.

One of the things that has frustrated me the most about the immediate aftermath of this moment in domestic U.S. politics is just how little self-reflection there has been on the part of the one party institutionally capable of standing in the way of something like the Trump administration. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard someone from this party say something along the lines of, “Well, you didn’t vote for us, so now you deserve this.”

My sense is if that was your orientation from the beginning, then we were never allies. We were never concerned about mutual liberation or resistance to fascism. There was simply a kind of temporary adjacency of self-interest, and now that it’s gone, everyone can go fend for themselves. It’s been especially infuriating to have some people think that my frustration with mainstream democratic liberalism in this country is somehow an endorsement of the openly fascist administration we have now. I am furious that we got to this point, and I think any political party whose messaging is so inept and so out of touch with what its principal demographic is asking for that it would lose to such an administration has a desperate, desperate need to reflect on how that came to be, rather than blame an electorate for not being sufficiently enthusiastic. The thing that scares the hell out of me the most about the coming years is that we keep fluctuating between these democratic administrations that have such a huge gap between the performance of virtue and their pragmatic reality that people get disillusioned and don’t vote for them, and then we get fascists in power.

In your book, you write about the importance of active and negative resistance while also grappling with the effectiveness or use of that resistance. I’m wondering how you resist disillusionment and maintain hope right now.

I know it seems like an incredibly hopeless book, but I also think of it as the most hopeful thing I’ve ever written. As disillusioned as I’ve become with all of the institutions of the West — political, academic, cultural — I’ve been so inspired by what people individually and in solidarity with one another are willing to risk to stand up and resist. I am a huge coward in almost every respect. I leach courage wherever I can get it, and I’ve leached it from so many different sources, from people I’ve never met who are sitting in their campus courtyard protesting and getting pepper sprayed for it, from people chaining themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers, from Palestinians, from Palestinian journalists who have risked and sometimes given their lives to get news out about a slaughter. There is immense bravery in the world. There’s immense courage, and the very least I can do sitting here in my nice safe home in rural Oregon where I don’t have to worry about my neighborhood getting flattened or my bloodline getting wiped off the face of the earth is not give up on someone else’s behalf.

I’ve found a lot to be hopeful about from these people who are much, much braver than I, even though if I’m being honest, there’s a lot of days where I wake up and I have no idea why I should get out of bed. The dejection after a year and a half of watching children get killed is not something I can just immediately dismiss.

Your answer at the beginning of this interview really encapsulated who you were writing for and what it means now that it’s out in the world, but I’m curious about how one reconciles any sort of success when the thing is so brutal. I am assuming ideally that you wouldn’t want to write this book because you wouldn’t want this to be happening.

There is no personal metric of success for me with regards to this book, and I think a little bit about what it means to live through a moment like this knowing that you could largely ignore it without consequence if you live in this part of the planet and if you have the privileges that I happen to have. … To be perfectly honest with you, if someone forces me to think of a criteria of success for this book, it’s either that it causes someone who previously had the privilege of not thinking about any of these things to start thinking about them or that it generates the kind of money that I can give to people who are actually doing the work, which I’m not doing, people who are actually on the front lines saving lives beyond those kinds of things. I don’t know how to think about not just the success of this book but success as it relates to whatever’s left of my literary career, and this goes back to what I was saying earlier: There’s a lot of things that used to matter greatly to me that just don’t anymore.

Earlier you mentioned that there are other books out there that you think are worth reading. Would you mind sharing them with us?

• “Recognizing the Stranger” by Isabella Hammad: A beautiful, beautiful piece of work.
• “Forest of Noise” by Mosab Abu Toha
• “Minor Detail” by Adania Shibley: My favorite novel of maybe the last decade. An incredibly powerful book. Short, sharp, written in two sections, and was one of the most stunning endings I’ve read in a very long time.
• “You Will Not Kill Our Imagination” by Saeed Teebi: There is a Palestinian Canadian writer named Saeed Teebi who has a work of nonfiction coming out in the next few months. It’s a spectacular piece of work.

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The Week(s) in Books

Ione Skye talks to The Times about her new memoir, “Say Everything,” which details her early life and the sense of desperation for love that drove her into whirlwind romances with Matthew Perry, Anthony Kiedis and Robert Downey Jr., among others.

From the Snow White-Rob Lowe debacle at the 1989 Oscars to the infamous “Star Wars Holiday Special,” Bruce Vilanch tells us about his new book, “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time,” which details his involvement in some of the most gloriously awful moments in the history of entertainment.

If awards season is your favorite season, check out our interview with Daniel D’Addario, the Variety correspondent whose debut novel, “The Talent,” follows five female actors vying for an Academy Award. He also gave us his thoughts on the tumultuous Oscar race that just came to an end.

Bookstore Faves

This week, we hop on the phone with North Figueroa Bookshop manager and buyer Amadeus Fuzz. Founded by independent publishers Unnamed Press and Rare Bird, North Fig focuses on indie titles, local authors and used books — and if they don’t carry what you’re looking for, Fuzz will help you find it.

“There’s no competition between independent bookstores,” Fuzz says. “It is all of us against Amazon. It’s every small business against Amazon. And if I don’t have the book, my job is to help you find the book that you’re looking for.”

What are the most popular titles at your store lately?

I see more people buying books from Unnamed Press and Rare Bird, mostly because that’s the quantity that we have available right now. “A Certain Hunger” by Chelsea Summers is probably our bestselling book in the entire store.

What are some of the upcoming releases that you’re excited about as a reader?

From Akashic Books, I just started reading “Monument Eternal.” That’s a rerelease from Alice Coltrane, the musician. She has an exhibit up right now at the Hammer and Akashic partnered with them to rerelease her book and it’s incredible.

Where is your favorite place to read?

Tierra de la Culebra Park on Avenue 57 here in Highland Park. I go there to read, I go there to write, and I really love it there.

North Figueroa Bookshop is located at 6040 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles 90042.

See you in the stacks — or on Goodreads!