Sarah Jessica Parker & Fatima Farheen Mirza

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Fatima, I mean, you started to write this, I think, when you were about 17 or 18 years old.

FATIMA FARHEEN MIRZA, AUTHOR, “A PLACE FOR US”: Eighteen.

AMANPOUR: Eighteen. You’re now around 27.

MIRZA: Twenty-seven.

AMANPOUR: So, it took nearly a decade, not quite. And obviously, when you started to write it, it preceded the current —

MIRZA: Yes.

AMANPOUR: — hyper-partisan feelings, certainly, about foreigners —

MIRZA: Right.

AMANPOUR: — about immigrants, about refugees and all the rest of it.

MIRZA: Right.

AMANPOUR: What was it that made you want to write about this book?

MIRZA: So, it’s funny you bring that up because that’ something I’m very relieved about now when I — that I began it before all of this. That I — that — which allowed me to approach this family. My goal when approaching them was that I wanted to — I knew the labels that the world might assign on them, and I knew the frequency of notions that people might have about a Muslim-American family post-9/11. But for me, I always wanted to protect them from that and approach them as characters, as individuals and ask them, you know, every time I sat down on the page, what is the story to you and what are you — what is your life like when you are alone?

AMANPOUR: So, Jessica, what did you most connect with? I mean, it’s a story of Layla and Rafiq, the parents who bring up their daughter. The eldest one is Hadia, the brother is Amar and there’s another sister whose name I just had forgotten.

MIRZA: Huda.

AMANPOUR: Huda. Exactly right.

MIRZA: Yes.

AMANPOUR: And it really does delve on their childhoods, on their ability to integrate within the American community that they grow up in, but it also has a lot to do with love.

SARAH JESSICA PARKER, ACTRESS: There is so much that is compelling about the book. And I think what I what I saw in it immediately and I think what you reacted to enthusiastically, which is a thrill for all o4 us, is that it’s a book about with big themes, you know, and it is a book about love but it’s also a book about what it means to be an American family, and all its plurality today. It’s a book about what it is to love and honor those who sacrifice for you, how to be an observant person and choose to be observant in your own way, how do you honor your faith, but also carve a place for yourself in the world, what it is to be a first generation American, to be a first generation American-Muslim today, how you see yourself and what people projects on to you. And, you know, the sacrifices we make for children, for love, it’s about parenting and missed opportunities and loving wrong sometimes. You know, it’s — I think it’s — and it’s weeping. And so, it feels big in those ambitions. But those inner monologs because there are so many quiet moments because they’re not being candid with one another, they’re so careful around one another, they’re so polite and principled that we get to be inside the bodies of these characters, and I think it’s about all of us.