March Narrative Medicine Rounds with MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu

"Someone Like Us," a conversation with Dinaw Mengestu 

Moderated by Naheed Phiroze Patel

We are honored to welcome Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning novelist, MacArthur Fellow, and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard, who will be speaking about his recent novel Someone Like Us. In Someone Like Us, Dinaw Mengestu tells the story of Mamush, the son of Ethiopian immigrants who seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home. 

After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage. 

With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. 

Naheed Phiroze Patel is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her debut novel, Mirror Made of Rain, was published by Unnamed Press in 2022 and was an NPR Book of the Day.