That process began around 2009, so up until publication, it took about five years.
I started out writing an essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review, but once it was about to be published, I knew that a book had announced itself. The Rumpus: How long did it take you to write your memoir, and what was that process like?īrian Turner: At first, I didn’t actually know I was writing a memoir. I reached out to Brian to talk about what links his memoir to his poetry, and how reading about and later returning to Iraq affected his perceptions of a still-troubled region. Using associative leaps like these, the memoir moves us beyond the more immediate sensations of war-adrenaline, fear, thrill, even boredom-toward a meditation on our collective experience of it. From sections 59 to 61, for example, we move from a kamikaze making his final preparations, to an Iraqi woman contemplating her reflection as she dons a suicide vest, to Turner’s platoon approaching the site of the blast. Interspersed among their stories are the imagined lives of the so-called enemy. We see his father, who fought in the Cold War, his grandfather, a veteran of World War II, and his great-grandfather, who served in World War I. The memoir follows his life as Sergeant Turner, an infantry team leader in Iraq, through his return to the States and subsequent travels around the world searching for an elusive answer-how do you come back from war?ĭivided into 136 numbered sections, the memoir splinters Turner’s wartime experiences and gathers them up again, arranging them alongside his family’s recollections of other wars. Turner served seven years in the military and deployed twice, once to Bosnia-Herzegovina (1999-2000) and once to Iraq shortly after the invasion (2003-04). Brian Turner, who earned his MFA in poetry before enlisting in the US Army, has given us not one but two poetry collections ( Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) exploring his experiences in Iraq, and his latest-the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country-revisits his deployment to navigate landscapes still mined with bombs and haunted by the dead of decades past. In its complexity, its larger-than-lifeness, its impossibility, war demands words. We have seen the products of war: widespread destruction, traumatized populations, resurgent enemies-as well as an abiding need to document and grapple with it.
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