Q&A with Ameera Patel

We’re excited to bring another exciting new voice to North American readers. Ameera Patel’s genre-crossing novel Outside the Lines is part thriller, part family drama, part literary fiction, told from multiple viewpoints. Set in the middle-class suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa, the novel’s narrative also crosses lines— class, racial, and religious—to peel back the facade of its characters’ seemingly placid suburban lives.

Drug-addicted Cathleen is kidnapped and her distracted family fails to notice her absence; Zilindile, who services Cathleen’s drug habit, and his Muslim Indian girlfriend Farhana, struggle to make sense of their relationship despite their very different backgrounds; and domestic worker Flora and the silent Runyararo, who was painting Cathleen’s house until accused of theft by Cathleen’s father, become entangled with romance and criminals, leading to the ultimate tragedy.

The novel has earned praise from several outlets— Shelf Awareness, CrimeReads, Mystery Scene, and a starred review from Publishers Weekly. We’re so proud to be the North American publisher for this book. Outside the Lines is out now, and available at your favorite bookstore and through our site. You can also head over to CrimeReads to read an excerpt from the novel.

We caught up with Ameera to chat about her book, her writing process, and how her experience as an actor and playwright helps her in her fiction writing.

Ameera Patel

Can you tell us a little about your background, and how you came to writing?

I studied Theater and Performance in my undergraduate degree, and have always been drawn to storytelling in different forms. One thing that stood out for, particularly as young women of color was the lack of plays written for women like us at that time. So a group of friends and I came together and found that we all wrote poetry and formed a poetry group, where we played with the idea of sharing stories that resonated with us. This is really where I got over my fear of having other people hearing what I had to write and yet I still found the sharing of this novel one of the most vulnerable processes, as it exposes the way in which my brain works. In many ways I find writing more exposing than acting, perhaps because there isn’t a character to mask the self.

I also chose to develop and focus on my writing more seriously in 2010, when I signed up for a Masters in Creative Writing, I’ve always been a little bit of a rule-follower and thought that a degree would make it real… And in many ways it did, it carved out time for me to really identify what and how I wanted to write.

Do you have a writing routine? Have current events impacted that process at all?

As a freelance artist, I struggle with routine in general. I have always longed to be the sort of writer that wakes up early every morning and gets their pages out but unfortunately the many versions of what my life looks like from day to day doesn’t allow for this. What I can say is that when I’m working on a project, there generally comes a point when the work and I find each other and then it stops feeling like work and rather like a story that needs to come out. Then, it usually becomes easy to make the time and space to work every day.

Many people have said that [the coronavirus lockdowns] must be a wonderful time for writers, time to hide away from the world and get lost in thoughts but for me it has been quite the opposite. It’s been a time of confrontation and unease. The world seems distant as it is filtered through other people’s lenses, as I myself remain at home, experiencing humanity through the news and social media. There is a new routine in these times, one which feels pressured, tense and difficult and perhaps it will push my work into a new direction. I always find it hard to analyze the current moment and where I fit within it.


Who are some of the writers that have influenced your work?

I am not one of those readers who needs to finish a book just because I’ve started reading it; I need it to speak to me and relate to me in some way. This list is therefore very long, it is made up of every writer whose novel or play I’ve kept reading. A few of my favorites however include K. Sello Duiker, Yewande Omotoso and Chimamande Ngozi Adichie from the African continent. To further abroad with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rawi Hage, Wajdi Mouawad and Staceyann Chinn.

 

You’re also a playwright and actor. How do you find those worlds intersect with fiction writing? Is there something different about your approach to storytelling when it’s a play vs. a novel?

I don’t think that I approach the writing too differently. I’m generally a strange speak-to-myself in front of my computer type of writer no matter what I’m writing. I suppose that what all three of my passions allow and where they intersect is the place where character and journey meet. I am intrigued by people and the reasons that they do things and so a lot of my work tends to be very strongly character led.

In Outside the Lines for example, I had an idea of where I wanted the story to go but the characters kept making other choices, forcing me to restructure and remap my plot. Sometimes quite radically, in fact I had initially thought that Cathleen should die after the first chapter but she just didn’t want to… and instead became a lead. I suppose as an actor, I like to sit inside the characters and really feel them out, I think it helps me to create characters that are multidimensional as opposed to stereotypes.

Outside the Lines

What was the inspiration for Outside the Lines? What made this story something that you wanted to tell?

There were two main things that I wanted to explore when I started writing Outside the Lines. The first was the idea of family and a home and what that means in middle class Johannesburg where domestic workers become part of the family, but the roles and rules are never clearly defined. It’s a relationship fraught with difficulty as the power balance is unnatural, especially between the domestic and the children of the family. While the domestic is clearly the adult in the situation, they very rarely have any power to discipline the children and are often not respected in the space. The relationship between Cathleen and Flora was essential for me but I feel that the power dynamics between all the characters are like fuses waiting to be lit.

I also wanted to tell a story that had a pulse, that felt alive and moved the way that my version of Johannesburg does. For me it is a lively, buzzing city, known for being dark and dangerous but also electric.

 

Can you talk a bit more about the city, setting your book there, and what you book reveals about Johannesburg to those unfamiliar with it?

Johannesburg is a melting pot and always has been. It’s attracted all sorts of people since its inception and remains multi-faceted and messy full of wealth and poverty, dirt and beauty, danger and family. It is as complex, if not more than, as any of my other characters and perhaps that’s why it takes up just as much space as they do.

I think that perhaps for people who don’t know it, Johannesburg is often seen as quite a dangerous city and one that should perhaps be avoided, and while the crime/thriller part of my novel doesn’t redeem Johannesburg of its darkness, the novel also allows the city to shine and show off it’s beauty and it’s strange sense of humor. I think what the novel does is that it exposes the city for some of its many faces that are otherwise not spoken of. It is also the only city that I’ve ever called home, so I am not completely objective.

This novel occupies an interesting space in literature — Is it a thriller? Is it a family drama? Is it a literary novel? Is it all things at once? How do you approach writing across genre? Is this something you were conscious of in the writing process?

I’ve always struggled to define the novel because it jumps quite wildly between genres. I do think that it is a thriller, a family drama and a literary novel all at once. It was never my intention to create this concoction of things, but they all wanted to be a part of it, and I think found a synergy within the story where they fit together quite easily.

There are multiple viewpoints in the novel. How did you approach writing from these different voices and experiences? 

It was a definite challenge to write from multiple viewpoints. I didn’t want to let any of the characters down, I wanted each of them to feel full and rounded and interesting and funny in their own way. It really helped me to give each of them a quirk that was somewhat unexpected but helped me to tap into something quite unique about each of them. For example, I gave Flora a slight obsession with the cellphone game Snake 2. I loved giving this very wholesome, endearing woman this strange addiction to a game (I will admit that at the time I might have been playing too much Candy Crush).

These quirks not only helped me find the humanity in the characters but myself in them too, so I could focus less on the differences between me and them but rather on our similarities. I suppose it meant that I never felt like I was writing the ‘other’ and would often ask myself what I would do in the situation.

Even though the novel does contain viewpoints from a diverse group of characters, there is still an element of an own voices narrative. Why was it important for you to include that perspective?

I wanted the novel to include so many different voices, initially there were three other characters but they didn’t make it past the first round of casting. But, something that I was wanting to achieve was to show the way in which Johannesburg is home to so many different types of people from an array of backgrounds and families.

In terms of the Indian Muslim character of Farhana, I don’t actually feel more in tune with her than my other characters beyond race and cultural history. While there are some nuances that I am aware of because of my cultural background, I wrote her quite far from myself in terms of personality, family structure and belief systems. I grew up a few streets away from where I set Cathleen’s house and with far more freedom than Farhana was afforded. If I truly wrote an own voice narrative, it would not feel like an Indian Muslim story and perhaps that’s why it wasn’t a story wholly based on this character.

What’s next for you?

I truly don’t know. I am about two weeks away from having my second child, which is thrilling and terrifying. In terms of work I am currently writing for television and some strange form of theater online. I am also feeling the itch to write a second novel, so I’m looking forward to carving out some time to think, dream and percolate.

 

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