March Narrative Medicine Rounds with Dinaw Mengestu

For our March rounds, we were 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.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of four novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: Someone Like Us All (Knopf, 2024), Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. He holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He is the director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College and the director of the Center for Ethics and Writing.

Dinaw Mengestu was in conversation with Naheed Phiroze Patel. 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. Her writing has appeared in the New England Review, The Guardian, Off Assignment, Poets & Writers, HuffPost, Scroll.in, BOMB Magazine, Public Books, PEN America, The Rumpus, EuropeNow Journal, Asymptote Journal and elsewhere.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds held on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year, hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them. A recording of our Virtual Narrative Medicine rounds is available following the live session on the Narrative Medicine YouTube channel, and you can watch other recent Rounds events there.