Some time after she has agreed to meet her son Jim’s jihadist killer—a British member of the ISIS circle that organized the videotaped beheading—Diane Foley receives a letter from the convicted man. It is courteous, careful, and generous. “It must not have been easy to sit before me and show the composure and patience that you did,” the murderer writes, ending with a promise to pray for her and her dead son and “my sincere apologies for what you have all been made to endure.”
In some ways, of course, it’s a riddle: Is this a shameless attempt to win sympathy and maybe freedom from a maximum-security prison? Has his time behind bars allowed the killer to reflect on his own mother and all the lives he’s destroyed? What does it mean when a terrorist speaks of God?
During their two days of face-to-face encounters, Alexanda Kotey had shown his victim’s mother a picture of his three young daughters, in a Syrian refugee camp, and explained that he was moved to his viciousness by seeing the wife and child of a friend of his killed by U.S. drones.
This haunting conundrum that can’t be reduced to simplicities speaks for everything that is remarkable in the heartfelt, gripping book produced by Foley and the National Book Award–winning novelist Colum McCann.
That she even chose to meet her son’s killer—over the objections of family and friends—shows Foley to be an unusual woman. And part of the grace of the book is to present us with a thoughtful and impassioned woman who sits outside every stereotype: a patriotic, devoutly Catholic mother of five—two of her sons serve in the army, and her daughter is in the navy—who nonetheless lives in liberal New Hampshire and casts her vote for Obama, only in time to be outraged by what she sees as the callous indifference of the Obama administration to her son and his predicament: Spain and France and Italy and Denmark pay ransoms to free their hostages, while the U.S and Britain refuse to do so.
Part of the grace of this book is to present us with a thoughtful and impassioned woman who sits outside every stereotype: a patriotic, devoutly Catholic mother of five who lives in liberal New Hampshire and casts her vote for Obama.
Artfully structured and delivered with propulsive intensity and heart, American Mother takes us deep into what must be every parent’s nightmare: to hear that your son’s beheading is live on Twitter, and then to be plunged, as a family nurse practitioner, into a world of bureaucrats, F.B.I. agents, terrorists, and swarming cameras for which nothing has prepared you.
It also, understandably, gives voice to a mother’s pride and love, as it delivers a full account of what took James Foley to his death. (He had been held hostage for 44 days in Libya even before he decided to go to Syria in 2012 as a freelance journalist.) Foley was the rare bereaved mother not just to mourn her son but to dare to enter the offices she’d known nothing about to try to ensure that future hostages from the U.S. never get ignored.
McCann, who grew up in Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s, has long been committed to seeing how we can get past our political divisions through what unites us at the human level. His last novel, Apeirogon, was an unforgettable portrait of an Israeli man who loses his 13-year-old daughter to Palestinian suicide bombers, and a Palestinian man who loses his 10-year-old daughter to an Israeli soldier, coming together over their common suffering, then traveling the world to make an argument for forgiveness.
McCann knows that Foley had every reason in the world not to sit across the table from the former drug dealer who took her son’s life, and yet did so as a way to assert that her son would not be forgotten—and in the hope that something useful might arise from all the violence.
The title American Mother kept bringing to my mind such films as American Sniper. But Foley and McCann are pledged to showing another kind of courage in war and a far less familiar vision of toughness and determination than a Navy SEAL upon a rooftop. “The truth,” for Foley, “is an ongoing enquiry into itself”; the human dimension of every story robs us of the luxury of easy assumptions.
To read the scenes in which mother and killer sit across from one another, delivered in palpitating detail, and to see Foley wonder how she might be able to help the killer’s daughters, is to be reminded that it’s those who are sure they know everything who are most reliably in the wrong. And that some souls are strong enough to step beyond even our most poisonous divisions.
Pico Iyer is a Columnist at Air Mail. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, and the upcoming Aflame, to be published in January 2025
