A Story Needs to Shake You Up

Akanksha Singh speaks with Jonas Hassen Khemiri, author of “The Sisters,” about the process of translating his own work and the power of the stories we tell ourselves.

By Akanksha SinghJune 22, 2025

• Fiction

JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI’S new novel The Sisters centers on the three titular siblings—Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia Mikkola—who believe they are cursed, and a writer named Jonas, who is drawn to these sisters before he eventually meets them, as a child, in a park in Stockholm. Set in Sweden, Tunisia, and the United States, the novel follows its viewpoint characters’ interwoven Tunisian-Swedish histories between 2000 and 2035.

It’s a richly introspective book, and it takes the reader a while to notice the lack of plot twists and epiphanies. At its core, The Sisters is a book that investigates its characters, written by a writer who seems as curious as he is cautiously self-aware. The fictional Jonas lends a brain-itchy, ironic, meta quality to the novel, leading the reader to believe (rather naively) that we’re in this together or anything is possible. But everything about this book is deliberate—down to its structure, which is sliced into one year, six months, three months, one month, one week, one day, one minute.

Khemiri spoke with LARB over Zoom. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

¤

AKANKSHA SINGH: In the novel, you write, “I’m trying to do it in English, to see if an imperfect language can make it easier.” You first wrote The Sisters in English, translated it into Swedish for the Swedish version (Systrarna, published in 2023), and now we have a new English version. Talk to me about that whole process—writing in the imperfect language—and tell me where the current (English) version stands.

JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI: This book is different from all my previous books in many ways. Previously, I had been writing in Swedish—that’s the way that worked when I was based in Stockholm. Then I got the Cullman fellowship, which made it possible for me and my wife and our two kids to move to New York, where I got to know these three sisters, and for some reason, they kept chatting away in English.

I published my first book 21 years ago, so I’ve been writing long enough to know that if something appears, there’s a great potential cost if you start to question it. You know that feeling, when you’re in fiction mode and something appears, and rather than embracing it and caring for it, you go, “Hmm, but you’re not what I had hoped for. You’re not the characters that I would like. I wanted to write another kind of book.” All of those questions are incredibly effective if you want to kill a project.

But these characters were adamant about speaking English, so I went, “Well, let me give you a chapter or two, maybe three, maybe 20 … maybe 637 pages.” I was afraid of stopping, so I wrote the whole book in English. And then, I had an awkward Zoom meeting with my Swedish publisher, where one idea I had for him was, “What if this is the first Swedish book published in English?” And he said, “No, that’s a terrible idea—this is your most personal book ever. I can find a translator who can do this, but I don’t think you can handle it.”

I felt very proud of the book in the end, but would I be able to rewrite the whole thing again? Did I have the stamina? Did I have the kind of patience for that? And then I had this moment at the Cullman Center where I asked Lewis Hyde, an older writer (in the kung fu movie, this would be me turning towards my sensei), “What do I do?” And he just looked at me and said, “What else are you going to do?” And then he talked about Nabokov—how he went back and forth between Russian and English, thinking to himself that every time he changed languages, it was just a new draft. That released something in me. So I started translating it, but I was the most ruthless translator! I could just change things! If I wasn’t happy with a scene, I just rewrote it.

The only painful part of this process was when FSG reached out and asked for the English version—essentially asking me to write the book a third time. That was the only part of the process where I shut the door to my office, drank a lot of coffee, and went through the book one last time. The running joke in the family is, “Oh, when are you going to write the French one? The Japanese one?”

Ultimately, this particular book needed this particular process, and I’ve never had more fun writing a book. I think writing it in English established just enough distance for me to be able to be more personal than I’ve been in the past.

You share a name with a character in the novel, Jonas. Is it fair to call this book part-autofiction?

Yeah. Every other chapter was based on a personal memory that I’ve tried to let go of. We all have these memories that we’ve kind of tried to understand for many years but never really figured out—I had a bunch of those memories, and I realized that, for some reason, they belonged in this book.

Talk to me about your approach with the autofiction—do you patch flesh onto a skeleton (of a character or event, say), or strip stuff away? Or do you start with them wholly formed and mold things, people, events to work for the novel?

Interesting question. It was a very organic process—the thing I love about writing is that when you’re writing, it feels like you’re reading. I felt like the sisters grabbed me by their hands and kind of said, “Let’s go. We got this.” And I just followed them.

Part of following this organic way of working is that the form keeps surprising you. When Evelyn goes to the US, Jonas loses someone close to him. And those things are, I think, in some way, linked, even though they weren’t.

I don’t know if I’d call this a spoiler, but the character you mention, Jonas’s friend, dies, but so much of this happens off the page. The aftermath of the death is thoughtful, though. Talk to me about that, and whether there was any self-censorship involved in arriving at how you chose to write this scene.

Part of why I wanted to write about that experience is that it informed a lot of my life. In trying to make sense of what that loss meant, and in writing this book, I also realized that I’d never understood that that loss came after a moment when I, maybe for the first time in my life, had allowed myself to be happy. I’d met the person who’s now my wife, and then my friend passed away. If you have a narrative where happiness is not linked to punishment, then maybe you don’t make that connection, but when I wrote out that part of my life, I realized the timing of those events might have meant something. And that brought some additional pain. I think that was what I was trying to explore in the book. You never get over the death of a loved one. It’s always a mystery. No matter how it happens or when it happens, it’s always there as part of your DNA.

I guess I’m trying to make sense of whether it’s possible to move beyond those kinds of losses with the use of storytelling. Can stories help us in those moments of loss? Because not only Jonas, in the book, but also the sisters have suffered a number of different losses, and they have these mythologies, stories—stories about the grandparents, the stories about the father, stories about the mother—that they use in order to survive, in a sense. And part of the question that the book seems to be interested in is, what’s the value of those stories? And there are three things that people seem to be focused on in the book: they focus on their stories, their mythologies, and this idea that ultimately they can build something—something big that will outlast them.

I like the idea of storytelling as a means of healing, or curse-breaking. You allude to this idea of literature as prophetic, in a sense. You write: “[I] gave the rest of my change to a homeless person, not because I wanted to be kind, but because I wanted to construct my own myth, even then, I was in the process of designing my life to function as a story.” Do you believe this, as a writer?

Meaning is such a big thing; it gives a sense of added value to that experience. It’s not only me giving money to the homeless person or whatever I’m doing. It gives me a sense of bigger meaning, and it also gives me a sense of control.

But what I’ve noticed in my own life is that it also creates a distance, it also makes it impossible, or it makes it tricky for me to be present in that moment of actually doing something for another human being. The risk is that we live trapped in our own egotistical stories, and we don’t see the people we are interacting with.

Is it that you don’t see them, or that you see them through that lens of being a writer, with something always ticking at the back of your head?

A curse is a negatively defined story that you’re trapped in. I had a friend who said, “A myth is actually just a story that you can’t get out of.” I remember thinking about that as I was writing the book—some stories that we have can empower us, they can help us. But ultimately, if you attach too much to anything or anyone, you will lose that entity. And you can say that’s a terrible curse, but you could also say that’s the curse of time, that we’re all dealing with. I mean, I have a friend in Stockholm who, I remember, went for a long walk with me, and all of a sudden he turned and said, “If we’re lucky, one of us will bury the other one.” That’s a very Swedish walk, a depressing winter walk, but I just realized that I had never thought about that. I mean, I was hoping we don’t die at the same time.

The characters in this book corrupt this idea that if they get too attached to anything, they will lose it. Part of their emotional struggle throughout the narrative is about how they can change that narrative. I found that the only way that I can change my own narrative, in my life, has been through replacing one story with another story.

One thing I think will surprise readers is the choice to not use quotation marks for speech—it melds together interiority with the external world. I feel like so much of what enriches these characters happens in their heads, or is unsaid.

I noticed that I was reading a lot of books where the dialogue tags weren’t too obvious, and I noticed my own response to that was that it does something for me as a reader—to stay active. I need to feel that you’re valuing my time as a reader, and I need to feel that I’m part of putting this narrative together. I’m part of this process. I see it as an invitation to readers to say, “Let’s try to assemble this thing together. Let’s try to make sense of these family mythologies, these curses.” It’s not completely obvious who says what at all times, but maybe that’s okay, because that seems to mimic the way memory works. I played around with different forms and structures, but in this particular book, I really needed the dialogue to blend in with the narrative, to create that particular reading experience.

One thing that really kept me on my toes as a reader was the humor, irony and meta-ness of it all. For example, you write, “If everything were a book, things could have been more logical […] would have led to something concrete.”

I think that we’re bombarded by comforting, simplistic ideas about what a story looks like, what it should be. There’s a bad guy, there’s a good guy, there’s conflict and resolution. I would love my life to look like that. I would love to be able to tell you that there’s a bad guy who lives on Flatbush Avenue, I have his address, let’s go there.

There’s a theory that the “setup, conflict, resolution” [formula] works because it mimics our thoughts. My thoughts are never that polished! Either I’m crazy or it is a lie—that narrative structure feels like manipulation.

I was at the University of Illinois the other day meeting MFA students, talking about structure and writing, and we got to talking about Scarface [1983]. You know the scene in Scarface toward the end of the movie, where he’s in this fancy restaurant, he’s high out of his head, and people are looking at him like he doesn’t belong there. And he just looks at them and says, “Me, I always tell the truth, even when I lie.” And I think that there’s something to that. My relationship to fiction is that there’s something about the well-known tropes, the well-known structures, that makes it really hard for me to believe in. I need to be shaken up in order to appreciate a story or to make a story feel real to me. So the stories I’m telling, they’re ancient stories—stories about love and loss and trying to find a home. But if you try to tell that story in a way that I feel is manipulative, I will not respond emotionally.

That’s a great point—my reading of this novel suggested it was plotless. It’s something contemporary English-language literature still doesn’t widely accept.

This idea that there’s only one way to tell a story, and that we need to push our narrative into that form—I find that to be really limiting as a writer. I also want to say that the weird thing about these structures is that, as readers, we’re wired for some kind of resolution. We’re wired to look for patterns, so I think we gently need to remind ourselves that these are not the only patterns. I think many of us who write think that we just need to use preexisting patterns rather than invent our own patterns. One of the things that I try to do with my students is talk about some of the alternative structures that we can use so that your story can breathe. Because I see your characters: you’re squishing them into a format where they don’t have agency. What happens if you copy that structure and you inject the power into your book? I’m a writer who generally likes to be surprised. But a lot of writers don’t—like a lot of readers don’t—read for that. This book exists for the readers who are looking for something else.

¤

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of novels, including Everything I Don’t Remember (2015) and Montecore (2007); plays, such as I Call My Brothers (2012); and a collection of plays, essays, and short stories, Invasion! (2008). Among his many honors are the August Prize, the highest literary award for Swedish literature; the Enquist Literary Prize; the Borås Tidning Award for best literary debut novel; and an Obie Award. His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages, and his plays have been performed by more than 100 companies around the world. He lives in Stockholm.

¤

Featured image: Author photo courtesy of Jonas Hassen Khemiri.