I’m sure some writer somewhere has a good answer to the “Where did the idea for your novel come from” question, but that wouldn’t be me. A novel is a living thing, and like life, it has many beginnings. Are we talking conception, gestation, birth, consciousness, or getting laid for the first time?

My usual response to the question is talking about an early image that obsessed me: Years ago my Italian publisher sent me a short documentary she made about The Compianto, the magnificent terra-cotta sculpture by Niccolò dell’Arca in Bologna dealing with the lamentation over the death of Christ. I was mesmerized by Mary of Cleophas, who lifts her hands in horror. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I kept imagining an old woman seeing her daughter and reacting in the same manner, which ended up as a major scene in An Unnecessary Woman. Was that the germinating idea for the novel? Yes, and no. At the same time, I was thinking of Bruno Schulz, who was temporarily kept alive by a Nazi officer by designating him as a necessary Jew. I obsessed with the idea of what makes someone necessary. There were several beginnings.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) began with a different image. I remember reading a Korean short story where the writer described rain sounding like one, two, cha cha cha. I imagined two teenage boys dancing in an underground garage. I went to bed seeing that image and woke up with it. I couldn’t let it go, so I “sat” with it. What was happening? Why were they dancing underground? I thought of Persephone. Did Hades dance with her? If Persephone, then I needed to have Demeter. The mother entered the novel and took over. It became about a mother’s love for her son and vice versa.

Sounds good, right? I mean, I believed it. The process happened exactly as I wrote it above. But was it the beginning?

A couple of months ago, I was rereading a short story of mine, “Bread,” which was published way back in 2001. I’d almost forgotten about it. Lo and behold, it was about two teenagers having sex in an underground garage—one a militia guy, the other a civilian. The story had a strong mother as well. There were major differences, of course, the primary one being that the narrator was a thirteen-year-old who idolized his brother.

Was “Bread” the idea that evolved into my novel twenty-five years later?

Why a garage? Or to state the question more clearly: What is my obsession with garages?

In my mind, the garage was always the same one. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, while my parents were still in Kuwait, I lived with my aunt and her six daughters in a fourth-floor apartment of a six-story building in Beirut. Like most buildings of its era in the city, it had an underground garage, and in it, there was a room where the concierge lived. I was eleven when the teenagers in the neighborhood got parental permission to have a party in the garage. I was told by my cousins that I was too young to attend the party, but since I was special and smart, I could help them clean the space and set it up. I was elated, obviously. I swept the floor all of Saturday morning, took a lunch break, and returned to work in the afternoon. The teenagers, almost adults in my eyes, brought down a record player and speakers, setting them up on one side of the garage. They had to wait till I finished sweeping before they brought down cushions—lots and lots of cushions. I noticed that the center of the garage was set up to be a dance floor, and the cushions were placed farther away, in various corners, and some behind the few remaining car.

Why were the cushions arranged in such a peculiar way?

I was so smart, I figured it out all by myself.

They were going to have sex.

That Saturday night, all I could think about was how everyone was having sex in the garage, the various combinations and permutations. I couldn’t stop imagining the possibilities. I’m not sure I slept that night, and if I did, I most certainly dreamed of these teenagers having illicit sex.

Did the idea for my novel emerge from that fifty-five-year-old memory?

I don’t know, but it might explain why the image of two boys dancing in a garage would obsess me.

I believe the problem with the “Where did the idea for your novel come from” question is that we seem to believe that an idea, or creativity in general springs from out of nowhere, from out of a vacuum. An apple falls, eureka, we have gravity. It’s never that way.

An idea arrives from another idea, which arrives from another idea, which arrives from

 

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), The Wrong End of the Telescope; Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; Koolaids; the story collection, The Perv; and one work of nonfiction, Comforting Myths. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and his most recent novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), won the 2025 National Book Award. He received the Dos Passos Prize in 2019 and a Lannan Award in 2021.