Doctor Savors Second Career as Novelist
The Taliban had outlawed kite flying.
"That inspired me to jot down a short story," says Hosseini, who is 45 and lives in San Jose, California. What was intended to be a nostalgia piece about a favorite childhood pastime grew in only a day or two in 1999 into a dark tale of loss, guilt and redemption that never got published. The story sat largely forgotten until Hosseini's wife, Roya, discovered it while cleaning the garage.
Upon rereading his work, the physician recognized enough potential to expand it into his first novel, The Kite Runner, an international sensation that eventually would spend more than four years on the New York Times bestseller list.
The drive to write so movingly of the people and customs of his homeland took Hosseini somewhat by surprise, he remembers, and propelled him into a transitional period between medicine and literature. During the 15 months he worked on The Kite Runner, the trim, self-effacing Hosseini awoke before dawn every morning to flesh out the tangled friendship between his two main characters--one an educated son of a wealthy businessman, the other an illiterate member of the servant class. He wrote from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., then hurried to the Kaiser Permanente medical offices in nearby Mountain View and treated patients from 9 to 5.
Although the schedule was rigorous, Hosseini faced only two particularly difficult periods. "Two-thirds of the way through the manuscript, Sept. 11 happened," he says. "At that point, everybody was talking about the Taliban and [Osama] bin Laden, and...I put the manuscript away." Nobody would want to read a coming-of-age tale set in Afghanistan involving kites, he reasoned. Roya, who critiques the early drafts of his fiction, encouraged him to resume. "She said, 'All the stuff on the news has to do with terrorism and the drug trade,'" Hosseini remembers, "'and your story is about regular people--it shows a different face of Afghanistan.'"
More difficulty came after the novel was sold. Hosseini had only a month to finish the editing revisions--his first real deadline. Not only did he rise before dawn, but he toiled at night, as well. "I'd come home and work until 1 or 2 in the morning, then get up and do it again," he says.
For more than a year after The Kite Runner debuted, Hosseini continued to work as an internist, and then he took a sabbatical to write his second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, another exploration of Afghan culture whose title comes from a 17th century poem about Hosseini's hometown, Kabul. His publicist says the two novels have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
The success of his fiction enabled Hosseini, the father of two young children, to create a foundation in 2009 to help fund education, build shelters and provide other aid to homeless refugees in Afghanistan.
"He has been able to amass the capital, and he has the vision," says Marc Breslaw, executive director of USA for UNHCR, which works with Hosseini and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "He's a deeply caring person."
The compassion Hosseini demonstrated as a physician is evident in his writing and charity work, Breslaw says. "Everything you read in his books is full of concern and care and emotion. Those are the same attributes you see in his work with us. Even though the stage has changed, the demonstration of who he is as an individual remains the same."
Hosseini visited his homeland twice and has been stunned by the hardship thousands are facing.
"Many of the people I met were living in tents out in the open desert," he says. "They have no access to water, schools, clinics. No jobs. That work has been tremendously, tremendously meaningful to me--in some ways more meaningful than the books."
The books made the foundation possible and also fulfilled his lifelong dream of writing. He trained to be a doctor because it seemed a good, solid profession, never imagining that he could make a living at his true love, creating fictional worlds.
With a new novel underway and The Kite Runner in theaters, Hosseini is glad to be fully engaged in his new life. He recalls how thrilling it was, at the end of his sabbatical, to choose to remain at his keyboard rather than put on a stethoscope. "I was elated," he says. "I felt like when you're a kid, and you've taken your last final exam in school, and you walk out. The summer seems so endless."
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