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On the importance of luck and family connections

"[Success] is so much about luck — that's the real thing — or it's often about class. I mean, if you were born into a family with connections, that is huge.

"[Jules] doesn't [have family connections]. And she doesn't understand that in the beginning when she thought that they all started out the same and that their lives would have a trajectory in sort of lockstep — like the Rockettes, going off into the world kicking at the same pace. ... When my friends and I first moved to the city, everybody lived in these junky little apartments and we all had takeout from Chinese restaurants and we all just sort of lived the same semi-marginal lives. But as time went on, and this is true in this novel, certain things could somehow take effect. Like if you were an artist, instead of getting a job as a paralegal, maybe your parents would give you money and you could go off and rent the cottage of a friend in Maine and you could really write a novel there. Whatever it was, she didn't understand that that was going to happen. She thought it was all even and it was all fair, and of course nothing's even and nothing's fair."

On Jules' struggle with envy for Ethan and Ash

"I was really interested in the subject of envy. But not that kind of big, overt envy, but instead the kind of quiet envy that you might feel for people you really love. She doesn't have — Jules — a big, big talent. So she becomes a therapist. She actually is pretty good at it and her patients love her. But then she looks over and over there in the distance are Ash and Ethan and they are living a life that she always thought was possible for her. So, can you enjoy your life? Is it enough if you're the therapist married to the really nice husband? What's enough to do with your talent and your brain?

“ It's like your life gets put through a funnel, and you see what remains.

"In any case — although I did not know it then — to fall asleep on Ifat's bed was milk enough, to sleep in crumbling rest beside her body. Sometimes like water she runs through the sentences of sleep, a medium something other than itself, refracting, innocent of all the algae it can bear and capable of much transmogrification. Her water laps around me almost in reproach: '"You were distracted, when I requested your attention. You were not looking. I was milk."'

The elegiac immediacy of this passage, the elaborateness of its metaphor, the language teetering on the edge of overreach — these are hallmarks of Meatless Days. Here, she describes her stubborn grandmother dragging home to her appalled family a live goat to be butchered for the festival of Eid: "Like a question mark interested only in its own conclusions, her body crawled through the gates ... moving in her eerie crab formations, [she] ignored the hangman's rope she firmly held as behind her in the gloaming minced, hugely affable, a goat."

Comedy and tragedy, tenderness and horror, sit close to one another in this remarkable book, doing justice to the piecemeal, intimate ways memory actually lives in the mind.

You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.

In some ways, it was like any other writing class: backpacks, books, rough drafts, discussions about literature. But instructor Christine Dumaine Leche and her students weren't sitting in a college classroom or a community center — they were on an air base in Afghanistan and the students usually came to class after long days in a war zone. Leche was teaching them to translate their experiences — the danger, the boredom, the painful separation from their families, the fear and the hatred — into prose.

Out of that classroom came dozens of intimate narratives of life as a soldier, including an essay by Sgt. 1st Class Billy Wallace about a previous deployment to Iraq. It contains this scene of him leaving home for that tour:

The dreaded time had come. Time to walk the family to the truck and say goodbye. My wife, Stefanie, and I walked hand in hand. She was squeezing my hand pretty hard. The walk to the truck seemed like the "green mile." I picked up my two youngest, Devon and Caleb.

"Where are you going, Daddy?" asked Caleb.

"I'm going to Iraq to make it a better place."

Then he plunged his fist, a pretend dagger, into my heart. My oldest, Austin, assured me he would be the man of the house.

Then Caleb piped up again, "Are you going to die in Iraq, Daddy?" Before I could answer he started crying as if he had broken his leg — long, deep guttural screams.

Devon, who has Down syndrome and is a total daddy's boy, said, "Daddy, no die please."

In some ways, it was like any other writing class: backpacks, books, rough drafts, discussions about literature. But instructor Christine Dumaine Leche and her students weren't sitting in a college classroom or a community center — they were on an air base in Afghanistan and the students usually came to class after long days in a war zone. Leche was teaching them to translate their experiences — the danger, the boredom, the painful separation from their families, the fear and the hatred — into prose.

Out of that classroom came dozens of intimate narratives of life as a soldier, including an essay by Sgt. 1st Class Billy Wallace about a previous deployment to Iraq. It contains this scene of him leaving home for that tour:

The dreaded time had come. Time to walk the family to the truck and say goodbye. My wife, Stefanie, and I walked hand in hand. She was squeezing my hand pretty hard. The walk to the truck seemed like the "green mile." I picked up my two youngest, Devon and Caleb.

"Where are you going, Daddy?" asked Caleb.

"I'm going to Iraq to make it a better place."

Then he plunged his fist, a pretend dagger, into my heart. My oldest, Austin, assured me he would be the man of the house.

Then Caleb piped up again, "Are you going to die in Iraq, Daddy?" Before I could answer he started crying as if he had broken his leg — long, deep guttural screams.

Devon, who has Down syndrome and is a total daddy's boy, said, "Daddy, no die please."