2025 Fellow Jeanette S. Jouili reflects upon her work with BookEnds mentor and program alumni Vanessa Cuti. 

My work with my BookEnds mentor Vanessa Cuti started with an editorial letter. Within these pages of generous feedback on my novel manuscript, she emphasized one point in particular: deepen the main character’s interiority. This came somewhat as a surprise to me. In my mind, I’ve been so clear who my protagonist Hayat was, what she wanted, and how I wanted to portray her, what I wanted to expose and what I wanted to leave unsaid. I could not comprehend at this point why something was lacking or what should be added. What I would realize throughout my journey with Vanessa was that my analytical map of my characters, drawn with an academic mindset—I’m a professor and researcher in the anthropology of religion—at times served as a shield that prevented me from exploring and developing my characters’ full scope of complex emotions. This revision work on interiority, therefore, was also one of lowering my shield to a more fully embodied narrative perspective—a shield I hadn’t even realized was there.

My novel THRESHOLDS is about Hayat, a young, idealistic, German Muslim woman of Tunisian origins, who relocates to her parents’ home country to recover from the trauma and injuries of a racist attack. Settling into her new life in Tunis, she meets Nassir, an upper-class, worldly, and secular architect, struggling to come to terms with devastating personal losses. When they discover their shared passion for reading, they initiate a book exchange of novels suggested by Nassir, and political writings offered by Hayat. Through their weekly book discussions, where Hayat and Nassir probe each other’s most cherished beliefs and commitments, they begin a journey of healing. 

I conceived the book club sessions as the vertebrae of the book, where two different characters meet, get to know, challenge, and eventually fall in love with each other. But as an academic, my personal obsession with the intellectual content of their conversations, despite having already cut down on it in previous revisions, still lurked. 

Vanessa wanted these meetings to be the place where we learn about the characters’ inner worlds and sensibilities rather than just their intellect. In her editorial letter, she wrote, “What we really need to see in these scenes feels a bit buried by the talk of the books. We need to see their relationship deepening, becoming more of a respite and joy to them, yes, but also the central challenge of the book. […] deepening interiority is key.” Throughout our five months of working closely together, Vanessa kept pushing me to dig deeper into the characters, develop and grow their inner voice, especially that of Hayat, which she felt I was holding back. Having read Vanessa’s novel The Tip Line just before beginning the mentorship program, I knew that she was the perfect person to help me foster what was lacking in my narrative: in The Tip Line, the internal monologues, dreams, fantasies and very unreliable perceptions of reality are a real delight. 

In the first months of our meetings, when I shared my revisions, she felt my resistance to opening Hayat up. Interestingly, Nassir’s interiority was already more clearly portrayed on the page. As we discussed possible reasons for this difference, I realized that I was too aware of the burden of representation in portraying Hayat, a religious Muslim woman in hijab—a character rarely seen as a protagonist in literary fiction. I felt  protective of her—and that protectiveness created more distance between Hayat and the third-person narration. Inadvertently, I portrayed her as a woman completely in control of herself and her thoughts—which she definitely was not.

While always kind and gentle, Vanessa was razor-sharp in identifying the missed opportunities throughout the book where the scenes wanted to dwell on Hayat’s inner life, and she pushed me to be more daring in exploring her rich interiority, including her doubts, longings, uncertainties, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses. She made me see that exploring and giving voice to these complexities did not water down her persona, nor did it necessarily open up to misrepresentation. Instead, interiority helped me develop Hayat into a deeper, more interesting character that the reader could root for. 

And as Hayat’s interiority took shape, the relationship between Hayat and Nassir deepened and evolved in meaningful ways as well. However much I loved their book club arguments, Vanessa showed me that every intellectual discussion needed to be cut if it didn’t speak to character development and change. When I was unwilling to let go of an argument about books, she challenged me to make that argument essential to their relationship. If I wasn’t able to do so, then it was a sure sign that the material didn’t add to the story of their connection.  

This technique helped me to tighten the book club sessions and tease out the emotional arc that had been buried in the intellectual conversations. The scenes became tighter, more emotionally charged, and essential to the relationship between my two main characters.

Vanessa encouraged me not only to dig deeper into my characters’ interiority, to excavate their weaknesses, fears, and insecurities, but also to face my own fears. I learned in the process that writing interiority can happen in the extremely complicated, messy, somewhat dialectical relationship between the writer and the character emerging between the pages—one that I should not prohibit with a scholarly shield to subjective, interior experience. Vanessa’s guidance on revision was my springboard to take that journey, with unimpeded vision. It changed the way I think about writing fiction.  

Jeanette S. Jouili was a 2024-2025 BookEnds fellow. Trained as an anthropologist, she is Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Thresholds is her first venture into fiction.

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