I Blame My Father’s Summer Reading Lists

On dangerous books, desert wanderers, and the strange afterlife of reading

It has only recently occurred to me that a surprising number of my life choices can be traced back to the summer reading lists my father assigned me.

For instance: at twenty-seven years old, having learned to drive only a few weeks earlier, I decided it would be a good idea to embark on a fifteen-thousand-mile solo road trip across America, camping in forests and sleeping on strangers’ couches.

This struck me as an original impulse at the time. A personal reckoning. A wild hair. Only now, a decade later, holding my father’s biography, The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt, published just this week, do I see the longer chain of events stretching backward across decades—beginning in his study in our house in upstate New York, lined with floor-to-ceiling books.

My father’s study was my favorite room: small, flooded with light, slightly forbidding, with walls painted the color of dried pomegranates and a cozy reading chair tucked into the corner. The room had the conspiratorial feeling of a place where dangerous ideas gathered.

A professor of French and Francophone literature, my father possessed the wonderfully questionable judgment of handing me books far beyond my emotional comprehension. Nabokov’s Lolita at twelve. Anaïs Nin not long after. Paul Bowles, Fanon, Flaubert, Kafka, Camus, Sartre. I read them omnivorously, absorbing far more than I could possibly understand at the time.

When my father gave me The Passionate Nomad: The Journals of Isabelle Eberhardt, I didn’t understand all of what I was reading, but that didn’t matter. I felt it all the same—an opening, a yawning, a rending.

At fourteen, I felt—as many fourteen-year-olds do—hemmed in by rules, expectations, the general indignity of not yet being free. I was restless, seeking, and predisposed to love the desert—in part because of my nature and in part because I had spent long stretches of my childhood in Tunisia, where my father is from and all of his family still lives.

But after reading Isabelle, I experienced those feelings, that place, differently. The following summer in Tunisia, I walked the dunes behind our family home alone at dawn and dusk. The bruised violet light. The silence so complete it felt less like absence than presence. I still remember the peculiar psychic texture of the desert—gradations of mauve and dust and shadow—the way the light becomes both softer and more severe at once, how the horizon itself begins to dissolve. In the desert, awe and fear become difficult to distinguish. You understand very quickly why mystics go there. You also understand why people lose themselves.

Years later, I found myself tracing versions of Isabelle Eberhardt’s sojourns through North Africa: studying in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, returning to Tunisia to gather oral histories, spending a semester abroad in Alexandria, and taking various ill-advised camping excursions into the Sahara, the Black and White Desert, Wadi Rum, Sinai.

Reading Isabelle Eberhardt at an age when I had never traveled alone, never fallen in love, never gotten lost anywhere except emotionally, gave me goosebumps of recognition for experiences I had not yet had. Like reading about a kiss before your first kiss. Because books do strange and subterranean work on us, Isabelle’s life folded into my imagination long before I consciously acted upon it.

Would I have eventually taken that improbable cross-country road trip at twenty-seven if I hadn’t encountered Isabelle Eberhardt at fourteen? Maybe.

I’m less interested in the idea that literature inspires us directly. It’s that stories lodge themselves somewhere deep in the psyche and slowly, imperceptibly, over decades, expand the borders of what we imagine possible for ourselves.

These days, my father and I share a Kindle account. He downloads Chaucer and Dostoevsky and rereads nineteenth-century classics; I fill our digital library with contemporary novels and memoirs, many of which he reads despite very much not being the target demographic. If someone stumbled across our shared Kindle, they might conclude that a scholar preparing for oral exams at the Sorbonne had developed a sudden interest in millennial female rage memoirs.

But maybe that’s what a reading life actually is: a long conversation. Between generations. Between strangers. Between the people we once were and the people we are still becoming.

And now, reading the biography my father spent years writing, about the woman who first cracked open my sense of possibility, I find myself thinking about the subtle and invisible ways literature rearranges a destiny.

Not always dramatically. Not all at once.

Sometimes it simply seeds a single idea deep inside you:

you could leave.
you could become someone else.
you could live differently.

And years later, without fully understanding why, you do.

An Evening with Papa Hédi at Rizzoli Bookstore

On Thursday, May 28, at 6:00 pm ET, I’ll be in conversation with my brilliant father, Hédi Jaouad, at the Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan to celebrate the publication of his new book, The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt.

My father was the person who first handed me Isabelle’s journals as a teenager, which means this event feels, in some ways, like the culmination of a very long literary indoctrination campaign—and possibly also the origin story of how I became a writer.

We’ll talk about Isabelle, deserts, nomadism, literature, and several other gloriously niche subjects my father has been passionately monologuing about since before I was alive.

I would absolutely love to see you. Please come help me pack the room for him! RSVP here.

Prompt 384. The Nomad Who Journaled to Disappear by Hédi Jaouad

Isabelle Eberhardt arrived in Algeria in 1897, dressed as a man, calling herself Si Mahmoud Essadi. It was not a disguise so much as a liberation—the male identity gave her access to worlds closed to European women: the desert interior, the Sufi brotherhoods, the slow conversations of men in remote cafés. She converted to Islam, married an Algerian soldier, and disappeared into the Sahara with a conviction that bordered on self-annihilation.

It was a contrast to other colonial visitors: she did not come to observe, but to vanish. Born in Geneva in 1877 to a Russian anarchist father and an aristocratic mother, Eberhardt grew up stateless, illegitimate, and magnificently unclassifiable. She spoke Russian, French, Arabic, Italian, German—languages she moved between as naturally as she moved between countries. North Africa became what she called her personal Tower of Babel, a space where mixed tongues and identities were not aberrations but a way of life.

On the first day of the twentieth century, she opened the first of four notebooks she called Journaliers—a French word that fuses the idea of a daily diary with that of daily labor. She described her journals as “a sort of outline of my life, my thoughts and impressions,” capturing “the sadness, the wanderings, and the anguish of that period.” In her most isolated moments, with no library within reach, she turned to her own pages for company: “One day, perhaps this notebook will replace an entire library and a whole collection of books now out of my reach.”

Her style was to write in quick notes, capturing the essence of each moment. A sampling:

“Left at moghreb [dusk]. Spent nearly an hour searching with matches for the only good spring in Ourlana, on the road to Maggar. Found it. Watered the horse and sick mules with my tin. Changed the guerba water. On the road, had an altercation with the shaykh from Ourlana. Around midnight, met the commandant of the Touggourt circle going on leave by cart. At about two in the morning, we rested because of malaise; all three of us were dizzy and vomiting. Slept on sand in the middle of the Sahara Desert. When we woke, we set out to search for animals. The man from Bou Saâda tried to light a cigarette with a pistol shot. Lakhdar, the bread and water carrier, left behind with his mule.”

Those last images are searing, even haunting. Her entries are filled with melancholy—a constant, almost innate sadness, called in Russian knout, that darkens even her brightest descriptions. Dawn and dusk, the moments she cherished most, became what she called “pathological twilights” on the page. Yet against this darkness, this persistent knout, she set two counterweights she identified in herself with clear-eyed honesty: “invincible energy” and “honesty of the heart.”

She was also, unexpectedly, a consummate aesthete. However harsh her conditions, she always found time to record “the durability of the sense of beauty, love of art and nature.” Her descriptions of the desert are among the most alive in French literature —“the land of triumphant light, abundant sunshine, its shifting dunes, endless spaces, captivating mirages, and ominous silence”—and she reserved her deepest tenderness for dusk, for “the purple and golden reflections of setting suns on the rolling crests of the white dunes.”

Over seven furious years, Eberhardt wrote over 2,000 pages and traveled ten times that many miles, alone or with caravans on foot, horseback, camel, or sometimes by train. She achieved a body of writing that is wholly, unmistakably her own. She never waited for the perfect moment to write. She never waited for ideal circumstances to write. She scribbled on horseback, in desert cafés, kif dens, margins of borrowed books, and in mud-stained notebooks she always carried. She grasped a lesson many writers spend years learning: perfect writing conditions never come, and waiting for them only leads to silence.

Eberhardt died in October 1904, swept away by a flash flood in the desert. She was twenty-seven. Her four Journaliers were found buried in the mud—one small canvas-covered notebook and three hardcover volumes, waterlogged and half-destroyed. Her final entry, written days before her death, reads like a premonition: “I’m about to start a new journal. What will I need to write down, and where will I be on that still-distant day?... God knows hidden things and the sincerity of testimonies.”

This is your prompt:

In her journals, Isabelle Eberhardt made claims: that leaving is brave, that noticing is an act of freedom, and that your journal is the one home (and library) you carry everywhere.

Imagine someone finding your journals buried in mud—waterlogged, half-destroyed. Who would they meet in those pages? What vistas would they behold? What terrains, geographical or emotional, would they encounter? What would a stranger learn about what you loved, feared, worshipped, fled, or spent your life searching for?

I’d love to hear what this prompt brought up for you. Feel free to share in the comments.

Today’s Contributor—

Hédi Abdel-Jaouad is professor emeritus of French and Francophone studies at Skidmore College and a two-time Fulbright scholar. He is the author of the recently released The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt: A Biography and the French-language memoir Une Enfance à Gabès. He is also the editor of CELAAN, a journal dedicated to the promotion of North African literature and art, and a devoted scholar of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, about whom he has written two books: Browningmania: America’s Love for the Brownings and Limitless Undying Love: The Ballad of John and Yoko and the Brownings.

Hédi’s intellectual curiosity and wide-ranging scholarship are reflected in a body of work that includes seven additional books and countless articles on subjects ranging from C.G. Jung and Michel Foucault to Paul Bowles, Jacques Derrida, Abd-el-Kader, Kateb Yacine, and Mohammed Dib.

He is also my beloved father.

Praise for The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt:

“A tale as enlightening as it is seductive.” —Peter Thompson

“With rigor and warmth, Hédi A. Jaouad sifts the record from the legend to present a complex, galvanizing portrait of an icon whose liminal existence—between man and woman, Europe and North Africa, asceticism and sensuality—continues to unsettle easy categories.” —Jonathan Miles, Eradication: A Fable

“This book is what the expression ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ was born for. Inspiring, exquisitely researched, and deftly written. I loved it.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

Happening This Week: A Workshop with Priya Parker

A reminder! On Wednesday, May 20, at 12 pm ET, I’ll be hosting a virtual workshop with my friend Priya Parker, one of those rare people who can walk into a room and make the whole place suddenly more honest, interesting, and alive.

We’ll talk about gathering, conflict, connection, and the magic of creating spaces where people feel safe enough to really show up. We’ll also explore how to bring some of that spirit into hosting a Journaling Club of your own.

The live event is free and open to all; paid subscribers will receive the recording afterward. Would love to see you there!