Despite our aversion to his actions, we root for him, perhaps because we find fragments of ourselves reflected in him: We all know we fall short we all want to walk in the shoes of that more noble self. He knows that a more noble version of himself lies somewhere ahead, but the reach is far, the path treacherous, and to get there he must summon the courage he disastrously lacked as a child. They haunt him through adolescence and into adulthood. He walks the world painfully aware of his faults and failures. But I think he is always recognizably human. Amir is deeply flawed he can be maddening, and his cowardice and hypocrisy at times border on appalling. There is a universality to this tale of a boy who feels inadequate and longs for his father’s love. Just why The Kite Runner has become so popular isn’t entirely clear to me, but based on letters that I have received over the past two decades, I can take an educated guess. I thought about introducing myself, but my constitutionally private nature proved prohibitive. Once, I sat on an airplane next to a middle-aged woman who was reading the paperback and dabbing at her eyes. I began to receive invitations to speak at libraries, universities, and at community-wide reading programs across the country. I would walk into local coffee shops and spot people reading the book. Then in the fall of 2004, a couple of months after the paperback was released in the US, something strange began to happen. I went back to being a husband, a father, and a doctor. The Kite Runner wasn’t making much noise, and though I remained deeply proud of it, I had resigned myself to the reality that in the end it was just another book in a sea of books. Life resumed a semblance of normalcy, and all was quiet for a little over a year. After, I returned home and went back to seeing patients at the clinic. I went on a two-week-long national book tour in the US, an often humbling experience that left me dubious about the book’s future prospects. In June of that year, The Kite Runner was published to solid reviews and sales that I would charitably call modest. It was a disturbing revelation and an ominous sign of things to come for my birthplace. I was shaken by what the note implied about America’s perspective and priorities, that Afghanistan was destined to go forgotten once more. This was June of 2002, barely nine months after American forces and Afghan mujahideen had forced the Taliban from power. But it declined me representation because it felt that the US public had moved on from Afghanistan the agency was instead combing for stories about Iraq. The agency had actually read and liked the chapters I had sent, and the letter was promising at first. ![]() The only rejection that stung did so for unexpected reasons. The rejections did not surprise me, and I take some pride in reporting that I took them in stride. The manuscript was roundly rejected by more than thirty literary agencies-nearly all of them with the two-sentence boilerplate “Thank you but this isn’t right for us” variety of response. And Amir’s long, gut-wrenching journey ended on barely a whisper of a hopeful note. For much of it, the protagonist was cowardly, self-involved, covetous, needy, dishonest, unethical, and infuriating meanwhile, the characters who were actually noble, true, and just fell to the worst fates. I was an unknown, part-time writer with no literary track record. While it’s now thought of as a runaway success story, The Kite Runner’s path to publication was unlikely, to say the least. Just how many tents they pitched, in how many countries, stunned me-in how many languages, and on how many stages and movie screens they shared their story. They pitched tents in the minds of strangers continents away. They whispered to each reader in their own unique and private language, as they once did to me. They became the center of a many-spoked wheel-with me as the original spoke. Out in the world, Amir and company formed bonds with others. But once a book leaves its creator for bookstore shelves, that connection with the characters is no longer exclusive. I had the illusion that everyone around me lived one life, while I lived many. Amir and Baba became my delicious secrets. Hunched over the kitchen table in the quiet dark of those early mornings, my ownership over Amir’s tale felt total. I had a foot in his world every waking hour, and he in mine. I listened to wheezing lungs and injected cortisone into frozen shoulders. Then I showered, dressed, and drove to the clinic to treat ailing hearts and aching joints and dormant thyroids. ![]() daily and spent three hours alone in the early morning darkness with Amir, Hassan, Baba, and the rest of the souls populating The Kite Runner. Through most of 2001, while still a practicing physician, I woke at 4:30 a.m. A book never belongs more to its writer than while it is still in the act of being summoned forth from the imagination.
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