Ismet Prcic isn’t finished writing his own story.
The L.A.-based author made his literary debut in 2011 with the novel “Shards,” which features a character also named Ismet Prcic, who, like his namesake, was raised in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and immigrated to the U.S. to escape the Bosnian War. The novel was a hit with critics, and took home the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
His sophomore novel, “Unspeakable Home,” out now from Avid Reader Press, follows another Ismet, a Bosnian refugee in the U.S. who is reeling from a divorce and recovering from alcoholism. He writes letters to the only person he thinks can understand him — comedian Bill Burr.
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Both novels — and a third one in the works — are inspired by Prcic’s life in two countries. “I realized that there are two people inside of me,” he says. “Every time I would go to Bosnia, I would feel guilty that I was American. And every time I was in America, I would hide the fact that I was Bosnian.”
Prcic discussed “Unspeakable Home” via phone from his home in Los Angeles. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: Did you find it difficult to write a novel that is so trauma-informed?
When I wrote “Shards,” I was very much trying to heal myself from the war trauma. I went hard into that, and I gave it my all trying to get to all of that kind of trauma, which is kind of surface trauma. Something happens to you and you are changed by it. And I thought, “Oh, here we go. This is going to heal me. This is my therapy. It’s beautiful.” And then, if anybody’s ever been on a healing journey, you understand that as soon as you heal one trauma, the one that’s layered underneath pops up, and that becomes the major trauma.
I spent a decade writing that book, thinking I’m healing myself, and then realized that a decade of writing this and going so deep inside of it caused me to have another trauma, which is alcoholism, and all this deep sexual trauma that I was not aware of when I was younger, or it was in the back in my mind.
There’s an extra chapter at the end of “Unspeakable Home” that kind of brings it back into the body and sets up that there is a possibility of healing, that there is a way out of it. And I believe there is, because I stopped drinking, I got better. I am trying to thrive, even though it feels really weird being this free. I have never experienced anything like it. I’m 47, learning things that people learn in their 20s, but hey, whenever it happens, it happens.
There’s a third book now in the mix, and I think I know what it is about, and I know abuse trauma because I also have that in my family. So there’s going to be another layer of this stuff. Hopefully, it’s going to be written in a more positive way, so I can actually claim that this writing can actually save you. I think it’s time for people to write their own stories. Because a lot of times when we go to therapists, we say things out loud, but nothing gets integrated; it goes up into the wind. But if you write it down and if you really sit with it, and then also have the freedom in it, because it’s fiction, to change everything and to heal yourself on the page, tell the story in a way that you want it to go.
Q: Much of this book is written in the second person, which makes it really immersive.
Very much so. When I first came to the United States, my roommate bought a computer, and he put this video game on it that was called “Delta Force.” It was a rudimentary first-person shooter, and that was the first time I encountered video games except for Atari from the ‘80s.
He would go to school and he would set up the game for me. He would come back after eight hours, and I would be still playing the same game, because I was so scared of being shot that I would go and crawl around. And in that slowness of crawling, even in a gamescape, you notice little details and you have your own thoughts. So I was trying to capture that. I realized that with the second person, you force the reader to enter the character’s interiority. You have to do it in a way that people are willing to go there, so that was a hard thing to figure out. So I use it strategically here and there. When I need something to slow down and to really go into the visceral feeling of the character, I try to use second person.
There’s a story that we tell ourselves to survive, and then the stuff that we tell other people, but there’s also a witness inside of us that knows exactly what we’re doing. And when you go into that interiority, the basic truth of it is probably what keeps the reader in the unflinching sense of, “Hey, this is what I’m doing. This is what’s happening.”
Q: This book has some really funny parts. Do you find that humor is either a result of trauma, something we do because of trauma, or is it something that we do to heal ourselves from it?
Yeah, look at the standup comedians. These people are all broken in some way, and they find a way to talk about this very intimate stuff on stage and make fun of it so that it helps them, and it helps other people because they’re willing to go there. Same with art. As an actor, you have to kind of go make a fool of yourself and try different things, and not everything is going to work out, but you have to go make a fool of yourself and roll around on a stage and be a clown and then see what works.
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And it actually happened for real. It happened the way I wrote it in the book. I was an alcoholic, and then I lost my marriage, and I almost killed myself a couple of times. And then at some point, I just realized there was a moment when I gave myself to the universe and I was like, “You know what? My whole life, I thought this is the only way to survive. I thought I could not live without booze. And then I just lay down in the bed one day and I was like, I’m not going to get up. I’m not going to drink water. I’m not going to take my medicine. I’m not going to take my Lexapro. I’m not going to eat anything. I’m just going to lay here and see what comes.” And I don’t know how long I was sitting there coming in and out of consciousness, but at one point I just opened my eyes and it was almost like that whole idea that I needed something to live went away.
Q: Bill Burr is almost a character in this book, in that Ismet keeps writing letters to him.
After I quit drinking, I was watching Netflix and I saw one of his stand-up specials. I really loved his delivery, really funny and angry, in your face and all of this stuff, but also, look, you can feel the heart. There’s a heart there. Despite the anger, there’s a good human being trying to see the world in the best of ways, and also kind of running away from his stories and making fun of it. So he just tickled my fancy, and I realized he had a podcast and started listening to that. He became a voice in my head, so it was really easy for me to write. It was the letters that kind of glued the other pieces together, because he was so much in my head, I felt like he was a friendly consciousness in there that I could converse with. And his own struggle with drinking and smoking and all that stuff was really helping me. So that’s why he was a shoo-in.
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