In 2012, James Foley, an American war correspondent in Syria, was kidnapped by Islamic State jihadists who beheaded him two years later.
As a video of the killing went viral, McCann’s in-box filled with emails of another haunting image: Foley, photographed in a military bunker sometime before his kidnapping, was reading Let the Great World Spin, McCann’s National Book Award-winning novel of 2009. McCann wrote to Diane Foley, offering to help tell her son’s story. She missed the note, immersed as she was in building a foundation in her son’s memory and devoted to the cause of freeing hostages like him.
In 2018 U.K.-born Alexanda Kotey was captured in Syria, extradited to the U.S., and, later, convicted of conspiracy to kill Jim Foley and other hostages. In 2021, as part of an extraordinary plea bargain that spared Kotey the death penalty, family members of his victims were offered the chance to confront him face-to-face. Diane Foley accepted.
McCann, meanwhile, was on tour for Apeirogon, his new novel about the friendship between two men – one Palestinian and the other Israeli – who had lost children to sectarian violence, when during a reading at Marquette University, Jim Foley’s alma mater, McCann was asked about the long-ago photo of Foley with his earlier book. This encounter led to a connection with Diane Foley – and their collaboration on American Mother.
The heart of American Mother is Foley’s encounters with her son’s killer. Along the way, McCann renders her transformation into a fierce advocate for hostages who, paradoxically, seeks out a spark of humanity in her child’s kidnapper. The bereaved mother induces the terrorist to reveal himself as a man like other men, with hopes and fears and regrets, himself bereft of loved ones slain in his homeland.
American Mother begins in the middle of things, as Foley prepares to enter a featureless room in a suburban Washington courthouse where Kotey will sit across the table from her for three long meetings beginning in the fall of 2021.
We enter her consciousness. Out of the pain and uncertainty surrounding Jim’s captivity and death, she finds “[o]ne sure truth: her son is seven years gone, and this morning she will visit with one of his killers.” She ponders how to confront him and, kneeling at the bedside in her hotel room, she prays, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”
Thus begins a spiritual voyage unique in recent nonfiction, as Foley endeavors “to rescue something from the barren.” They will come to know one another – the stylishly dressed mother and the murderer in green jumpsuit and leg irons – with a measure of empathy and, in the end, a moving touch of grace.
McCann is masterful in blending historical exposition, vivid specifics of the scene before him, and the hidden wells of anguish and consolation stirring underneath it all. In the few seconds after she introduces herself, Kotey appears to her as a metaphor – “he is a dark doorway” behind which “her son waits.” She recalls her family’s response to her decision to meet with Kotey. (“Why not let him rot in a cell?’’) She mentally reviews the assassins’ video in the desert: Jim Foley in a black hood, “the slice of the knife across the neck.” We even get hints at the inner man behind Kotey’s “pure London” accent, his beard, his practiced lies, his “thin smile” – and the disarming confidence it projects.
The book alternates between omniscient third-person narration and Diane’s first-person voice. Flashbacks paint Jim’s Midwestern childhood, his work as a reporter, his altruism alloyed with a thirst for adventure that could border on recklessness. Diane bridles at what she views as official U.S. indifference toward hostages. She despairs over Jim’s death but seizes the opportunity to face Kotey and strive for some understanding of his damaged soul.
At one point McCann considered fictionalizing Foley’s experience – his method with the well-received Apeirogon – but decided that her story had to be told the way it happened. For the most part American Mother thrives on the tension between fidelity to fact and the techniques of fiction. Sometimes, though, the strain shows, particularly when McCann labors to downplay his crucial supporting role in the action. We learn, for example, that recording devices were not permitted in the room where Foley and Kotey met (accompanied by prosecution and defense lawyers and McCann himself – identified as “a family friend”). There’s no documentary record, yet McCann portrays the sessions in great detail – verbatim exchanges of speech, passages of Foley’s simultaneous thoughts, minute details of Kotey’s demeanor. At this point the narrative hints awkwardly that there is a kind of truth to be found beyond the facts. In the coming hours, we are told, “every syllable is a whistle of truth and lies.”
In any event, McCann weaves a rare fabric of hope from the twin strands of Foley’s hard-headed activism and her spiritual passion. Their meetings enable Kotey to drop his mask and show glimmers of respect for Foley and remorse for the pain he has brought her. American Mother holds out some possibility – to paraphrase one of Foley’s favorite prayers – that “where there is hatred, we may sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is darkness, light.’’
I discussed American Mother with both Colum McCann and Diane Foley via Zoom. Responses have been edited for space and clarity.
JM (John Mulligan): How did you collaborate on this book?
DF (Diane Foley): Well, it was quite serendipitous. Colum was on the book tour with Apeirogon; that’s how I got introduced to his work.
JM: Was it clear that there was a bond to be forged, based on the way that McCann had written about sectarian strife?
DF: Well, Colum is quite a poet… I felt the story needed to be told.
CM (Colum McCann): When Jim was killed, I was deeply moved, deeply upset. [McCann points to the Foley photo pinned onto the door of his study in New York City.] John and Diane Foley treated me – poignantly – like a son. So I embarked on this journey, my first real nonfiction encounter. For a while I thought I might even do it as a novel, like I did Apeirogon, but I’m very happy that we did it the way that we did. Diane?
DF: I was incredibly grateful that Colum offered to accompany me to these three visits with Alexanda Kotey. It was very important to me that this be nonfiction. To me it’s a very true, very real story since I underwent it and Jim did.
JM: Did you decide beforehand what to say to Kotey?
DF: The only thing I really planned was to show that I wasn’t afraid of him, to explain who Jim was, and to give him the opportunity to share with me what he was thinking.
CM: I think Diane was there to excavate things that were not factual… something deeply spiritual. She was excavating not only his soul, and not only Jim’s soul, but her own soul too… There was a great amount of dignity there, no thirst for revenge. She didn’t want to, need to, humiliate anybody. She was going in to understand something much deeper.
JM: Is there such a thing as truth?
DF: Oh, absolutely. Journalists try to build a case on facts…
CM: Jim was very good at that, at the facts. [He discusses the book’s depiction of a Foley video report from Afghanistan in 2011.] But the interesting thing about Jim is he was also able to get at the deeper textural truth… You can tell all the facts and they mightn’t even be truthful in the end. What Jim understood was what a poet would understand or somebody with enormous moral courage to empathize with people.
JM: Can you describe your feelings, Diane, about how Washington handled the hostage situation that involved your son?
DF: Well, I was very angry at our government. But Jim wouldn’t have wanted me to stay under this dark cloud of anger and resentment, so within three weeks of Jim’s murder, we decided to start the foundation to create a silver lining to the horror of it… Some of the progress has been very healing, to be able to meet with families… That’s Jim’s legacy.
JM: How did you feel about Kotey?
DF: I felt a lot of sadness for him because we all lost. We lost Jim. [Kotey] lost his freedom, his access to his family and his children… so I [tried] to be the best listener I could. [She recalls the end of the final interview, when she unexpectedly offered Kotey a handshake – and he accepted.] I didn’t plan to shake his hand; it seemed like the right thing to do…
CM: That was one of the most stunning human moments I’ve ever seen… I saw Diane and she took her bag and she’s going across the room. And then she stopped. And Kotey was standing behind a desk and Diane started to move towards him.
JM: You got a chance, Diane, to be an instrument of peace.
DF: That’s the hope. We’ve got too much hate in this world, division, resentment… And it was thanks to Colum that we’re able to get it on paper and to make it into a cohesive story.
CM: It’s going to reverberate. It’s always going to reverberate.
American Mother
By Colum McCann with Diane Foley
Etruscan Press
Published March 5, 2024
Southern Review of Books 