The kite runner’s guilt

Khaled Hosseini feels guilty about his own success, said Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times (U.K.). As a child he dreamed of becoming a novelist, but in 1979 the Soviets invaded his native Afghanistan, and his family fled abroad. “When I came to America at 15, I didn’t speak any English, so the idea of making a living from words seemed so outlandish as to be preposterous.” Instead, he attended medical school. But the itch to write wouldn’t go away. So in 2001, he started writing a novel based on a news report about the Taliban banning kite flying, an activity he had loved as a child. “I wrote from 4:30 a.m. to 8 a.m., then saw my patients all day. I am a little in awe of it myself now. The energy it took to write that book I don’t have anymore.” The Kite Runner, published in 2003, topped best-seller lists around the world and made Hosseini, 48, a millionaire. Sometimes, he feels “a little icky” about his good fortune. “I wrote about people in Afghanistan who suffered for a long time, and their stories made me very successful. That has left me with a sense of debt. Writing is an act of thievery. You adapt experiences and anecdotes for your own purposes.”

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