‘AMBASSADOR’S WIFE’ USES FICTION TO TALK ABOUT REAL ISSUES

“Ambassador’s Wife” uses fiction to talk about real issues

By Rege Behe

Monday, Aug. 24, 2015, 9:00 p.m.

Jennifer Steil intended to write a story about an ambassador’s wife who is kidnapped in a Middle Eastern country. The themes that emerged as the narrative progressed — about art, family, gender and identity — were not intentional.

“These things just kept coming up,” says Steil, who will appear Aug. 27 at Point Park University, Downtown, and the Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley to promote her first novel, “The Ambassador’s Wife” (Doubleday, $26.95).

The result is a multilayered novel that provokes discussion but also entertains. Set in the fictional country of Mazrooq, Steil draws on her experiences as a journalist in Yemen, becoming a mother and her marriage to Timothy Torlot, currently the European Union ambassador to Bolivia, but previously posted in Yemen.

Being an ambassador’s wife may sound glamorous — the excitement of visits by statesmen and dignitaries, the official ceremonies, the parties — but Steil, while participating in those functions, refuses to devote herself entirely to those duties. Like Miranda, the title character, she insists on being able to establish her own identity.

Some women who marry ambassadors happily give up their own careers to support their husbands, and, “there’s nothing wrong with that if it makes you happy,” Steil says.

But Steil, who was working as the editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer when she met Torlot, admits her adjustment was difficult, and not only because of the bodyguard who accompanied her every time she left the ambassador’s residence.

“When I met my husband, I was 38,” she says. “I’d always been independent, I always had my own career, I always made my own money. I was definitely not used to being someone’s wife. I was used to being introduced as Jennifer the journalist or Jennifer the writer, not Jennifer the sidekick of the ambassador.”

Her new living quarters suddenly became a haven for hostage negotiators, British ministers, Scotland Yard officials and “all sorts of interesting people,” she says. “That was the good part, but you give up a lot of privacy when your home is a place of business.”

In order to maintain her sanity, Steil turned to writing. In 2010, she released a memoir, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” and then turned to fiction. While she strove to be accurate and fair in her memoir, she admits that process was painstaking.

“I was kind of tired of telling the truth,” Steil says. “I wanted to be able to fabricate and exaggerate. And also, I had just met my husband and was not willing to ruin his career so early in our marriage. … There were a lot of things I couldn’t say about our life.”

One of the things Steil wanted to write about in “The Ambassador’s Wife” was the Yemeni people via their fictional counterparts in Mazrooq. The residents of any Middle Eastern country, she thinks, are often viewed through a singular lens by the West. But the reality of their existences are as a complex and varied as the population of any American state.

“Every time I tell people the Yemenese are the friendliest, warmest and most wonderfully generous people I’ve ever met, everyone here in the U.S. is always shocked,” Steil says. “The media portrays Yemenese as bad, evil terrorists, ignorant and impoverished. They are impoverished; it’s one of the poorest countries in the world. But they’ll meet a stranger and offer them their last morsel of food.

“I really feel that we don’t portray people in the Middle East as fully human in the same way we portray people in Europe or the U.S. I wanted to correct that.”

Read more: http://triblive.com/aande/books/8918854-74/ambassador-steil-wife#ixzz3ksX8q6zA
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