Growing up in a place where the white man was looked to as this intellectual superman, I was always a step ahead in my hunt of not only white writers, but also white readers. This included reaching out to strangers on Facebook from places as well-known as New York and as unheard of as Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and getting a ‘fuck you’ in reply. Of course, the blame was on me; lacking discretion and proper English, I probably came across as some stalker or a creep. And this was the late 2000s, a time when social media was still a relatively insular place. But then again, I was also from a culture where you want to know everything in the first conversation, down to one’s salary. Soon, however, I would cover this gap along with millions of other Pakistanis in what I would later come to know as the Americanization of the mind. I had now picked up this sensibility and was able to think and react in American terms.

Such dissonance was amplified the more white writers I read – writers like John Green, Stephen Chbosky, David Levithan, Sarah Dessen, Rainbow Rowell, and their ilk hijacked my idea of literature. But how was I to write about the high school, the beach, the downtown, much less suffuse it all with my own Americana? Reading in the semi-desert of rural Sindh, Monica Wood’s “When We Were the Kennedys” is the kind of book that might have given me a direction, if not an answer. Sharing the same exterior as the above-mentioned white-and-alive scribblers, Wood has that abracadabra for real literature with slice-of-life moments that my adolescent mind sought in the confines of YA fiction. But then again, it’s too unfair a comparison, as Monica Wood is a great writer; and, having read some of her books, this great memoir is likely her greatest work. It immediately put me in mind of Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” and Dan Schneider’s “Tumbleweeds”. No, it doesn’t reach their heights, but stakes out its own territory, and is a worthy kindred in its panorama—this time, the 1960s America of Mexico, Maine. […]