Well it's been a while!

Thank you all for hanging in there. I have had some issues trying to access my account and navigate the digital space. For those of you who know me, this is no surprise. I have Luddite tendencies. For those of you who don't know me, it's probably no surprise either!

But I wanted to alert you all to my newest work, and my first non-fiction book, American Mother from Etruscan Press in the States and Bloomsbury in the U.K and Ireland. It's a book very close to my heart, so thank you most sincerely for taking an interest in it.

And as a significant portion of the profits go to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, it is very important that we get this book off to a good start. So I'm counting on you and the community here to help this story get out into the world ....

In August of 2014 my inbox was flooded with emails regarding the death of the American journalist James Foley. In a video seen and heard around the world, James had been brutally killed by ISIS. But the image that flooded my inbox was not the iconic one that marked an era, but a quieter one of an earlier time, a happier time, when James was still alive. He had been photographed in a military bunker, reading a novel. That novel happened to be my own 2009 book Let the Great World Spin. I was flabbergasted and emotionally stunned.

A few months later I decided to write to James Foley’s mother, Diane, telling her that I would be happy to help write her son’s story, or indeed her own. I didn't hear back from her. Shortly thereafter, I heard that she had signed a contract to write her own book, and I thought that I would leave well enough alone -- Diane was more than capable of telling her own story.

Fast forward another six years and I was on book tour for a new novel Apeirogon. In the course of a Zoom at Marquette University (James’s alma mater) I said that I had tried to be in touch with Diane, and that I was still intensely touched by the photograph of her son reading one of my novels. One of James’s best friends, Tom Durkin, was on the call. So too, it turns out, was Diane Foley! An hour later my inbox pinged. It was Diane. She told me that she had never seen my email. In the years after, she had tried to write her own story but had come up short. She expressed a sorrow that her story would not enter the world.

I was taken by Diane’s candour and grace and honesty. I suggested that I would drive from my home in New York to her home in New Hampshire, where I could sit with her and her husband, John, and perhaps operate as a “story whisperer” of sorts. I knew that her story needed to be told, and I hoped that I could help thaw some of that frozen sea. As it turned out, she told me that she would like me to accompany her to a Virginia courthouse where she had been given an opportunity to talk to her son’s killer, Alexanda Kotey, who had recently copped a plea to kidnapping and conspiracy to murder. Part of his plea agreement was that he would talk to the victims (of whom there were some still living) and/or the victim’s families. This updated the story for me -- it was taking on a whole new life …

So began American Mother.

The writing of this book has been one of the most searing and yet rewarding experiences of my literary life. I got to know Diane and her husband John. I got to know the story of James Foley. I got to meet his confessed killer, Alexanda Kotey. I got to experience the arc of justice. I also got to see what it meant to excavate the principles of forgiveness and compassion.

This book is not mine. Nor is it just Diane’s. It’s a book about journalists and storytellers and how they join the world together. It’s also a book about a mother’s uncompromising love, and not just one mother, but a nation, or nations, of them. It’s also a book about a time that seems so far away, and yet it penetrates every waking moment of where we are now. Not only that, but it is a book about those others, around the world, who have been, and are being, kidnapped and held hostage, or wrongfully detained. There are many of them. They have another hero in their midst – Diane Foley and her cohorts in the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation who have spent the past years working tirelessly to help alleviate their plight.

I am grateful that I got a chance to be a part of this story. Of course, one wishes that it would never have happened in the first place. But it did. And rather than succumb to the harsh reality of terrorism and violence and death, there have been many people in the world, not least Diane herself, who have sought to bring a slice of solace to the world.

So much of this solace comes in act of storytelling. Even more of it comes in the art of listening. So, I thank you for reading and listening. I hope that in some way it echoes back into the days when James Foley’s moral courage and desire to tell the world about injustice came ringing through. And I hope also that it reverberates in the words of Alexanda Kotey who, despite his horrendous deeds, was able to recognise, through Diane Foley, the compassion we crave in us all.

Please help spread the word!!!!!



Yours sincerely,

Colum McCann

American Mother