Alexia Nader

Alexia Nader is the author of The Meaning of Daughter. She was a 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellow. Her work has been published in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker among other publications. She is from Miami, Florida and currently lives in San Francisco where she teaches creative writing to children and teens.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The Meaning of Daughter comes from a line in the first section of the novel which reads in full, “The Meaning of Daughter is a girl who helps her family, especially her mother.” The line is an expression of a minor character’s point-of-view but the title I hope does the opposite of imposing a point-of-view. The Meaning of Daughter is a multigenerational novel, narrated in three first-person sections by three different generations of women in a family. The structure of the book encourages the reader to contemplate how each character defines and redefines herself in relation to her mother and I think the title frames this experience nicely. The openness of the title is meant to emphasize that there is no one meaning of daughter in this novel and instead what you will get when you read is a variety of obligations, intimacies and tensions that form multiple meanings of the role of daughter.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage reader self would be very surprised that I wrote a novel that explored the migration of my father’s side of the family from Lebanon to Haiti to the United States. As a teenager, I wasn’t exposed to novels that reflected migrations of Middle Eastern people to the Caribbean or Latin America. The only Latin American cultural figure with Lebanese diasporic roots I knew of at the time was Shakira! Later in my life, I realized that I really needed to read a story with this particular migration at the center and in order to read it, I would have to write it.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

For this particular novel, I found it much harder to write the ending. The first two sections of the novel are written from the grandmother’s and mother’s respective perspectives and culminate in the reader having a developed understanding of the history behind a seemingly intractable conflict between them that plays out in the third and final section of the novel. The tricky part of this structure was that I really wanted the third and final section to be narrated not by the grandmother or the mother but by the granddaughter, the third generation. So my challenge for this part was to understand how to unspool the conflict between the grandmother and the mother through the eyes of the granddaughter while also giving the granddaughter her own storyline and urgent concerns.

I must have rewritten the ending four or five times before I found the right direction for the story. Whereas I revised the beginning of the novel only once on a macro-level in addition to line-level revisions with my publisher.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I had a mentor who advised me to put something of myself in all my characters and I have tried my best to do that in The Meaning of Daughter. I think when you put something of yourself in your characters, you are showing the reader that you trust them to receive some vulnerable part of you and this can create a powerful connection between the author and the reader. The three protagonists of The Meaning of Daughter each have a desire that I have recognized in some form in myself. But I think it’s more accurate to describe their desires as translations of my own desires since these characters exist in contexts and circumstances that are different from my own.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The Meaning of Daughter is inspired by Haitian visual art. Two of the protagonists are visual artists and the third is an art dealer. The novel places fictionalized artist characters in the rich history of 20th century Haitian artmaking, and explores the difficulties of making and selling art as a woman in this context. Many of the scenes are directly inspired by specific paintings or photographs that have been in my life since I was a child or that I found when researching the book.

Visit Alexia Nader's website.

See Nader's seven books that weigh the choice of motherhood.

--Marshal Zeringue