Sara Hamdan on the contradictions, joy and trauma behind her hit debut novel

What Will People Think? explores cultural pressure familiar to many women in the region, says author

Sara Hamdan is a former New York Times journalist and Google editor. Photo: Farooq Salik

Sara Hamdan knows what it means to live with contradictions, even in her highest moments.

Her debut novel, What Will People Think?, featured in a recent episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, propelling the Palestinian-American author into international attention overnight. The recognition was thrilling, but even as messages of congratulations poured in, Hamdan couldn’t celebrate wholeheartedly.

“On the one side, I’m expressing this joy – ‘oh my gosh, Jimmy Fallon is holding my book on the TV’,” she says. “But at the same time, as a Palestinian-American witnessing this insane humanitarian crisis in Gaza that’s happening, what separates me from that young mother in Palestine who may have had the same dreams as me and never had a shot? It’s just pure privilege. Geographic luck. Circumstance.

“When you have Arab or specifically Palestinian heritage, like I do, it's almost like you're born with a broken heart, and you're constantly trying to mend it,” says Hamdan, who lives in Dubai.

“This is actually not new, and it's repeated wounds that are just not allowed to heal. How are we supposed to live life? How are we supposed to live knowing that could have easily been me, if not for small decisions made generations ago?”

This duality is one of several reflected within Hamdan’s novel.

What Will People Think? follows a Palestinian-American stand-up comic, Mia, who tries to navigate between her bold stage persona and her family’s traditional expectations.

Mia’s story – set in New York in 2011 – is intertwined with her grandmother’s hidden past. In the novel, Mia discovers a diary written by her ‘Teta’ in 1940s Jaffa, just as she was on the verge of displacement during the Nakba.

The entries trace the life of a young woman celebrated as the village beauty, torn between her family’s expectations of a wealthy marriage and her own attraction to a British soldier. The romance is brief and ultimately devastating – a metaphor, perhaps, of Palestine’s unravelling.

The diaries were actually written first, Hamdan says. A decade ago, while pregnant with her son, she began drafting those passages as a self-contained story, drawing from her own grandmother’s recollections and her journalistic research into life in Palestine before 1948. “I actually wrote those scenes as one complete section in one go,” she says.

However, when she began pitching them to agents, reactions were lacklustre, and inspired Hamdan to incorporate “a more contemporary” element.

That’s when Mia’s story began to take shape, eventually braiding together with the Jaffa diaries. “Mia’s comedy gets better as she understands herself and pushes boundaries a little more each time, and I put in the grandmother scenes in the middle,” Hamdan says. “So you see these two Palestinian women in different timelines taking risks.”

But Mia’s story was more than about simply finding a vessel through which to present stories from 1940s Palestine. Bringing Palestinian characters to a modern, relatable plot was as pivotal as telling a tale of generational trauma.

“I really wanted to write a book that had Palestinian characters because I’ve never seen that growing up. I wanted to see that representation,” she says. By placing Mia on stage, cracking jokes with a microphone in hand, Hamdan aimed to expand the types of stories that Palestinian women inhabited.

For Sara Hamdan, bringing Palestinian characters to a modern, relatable plot was as pivotal as telling a tale of generational trauma. Photo: Farooq Salik

“I would love for my children to see a story that – yes, this is essentially about a Palestinian family that gets displaced in the 1940s so it does have that emotional depth, the trauma is there – but at the end of the day, this is also a romantic comedy. We’ve never seen that before.”

Hamdan also wanted to explore a different internal tension through Mia’s character – a cultural pressure familiar to many women in the region.

“Every Arab woman in particular has a public face and then the private face of how they feel,” Hamdan says. “It's about how we present ourselves on the outside and how we feel on the inside, and then how you align those two things.”

These many contradictions fuelled Hamdan’s debut novel. Even if her literary breakout seems like an overnight success, it was the culmination of a decade spent writing in stolen hours. She needed that fuel.

What Will People Think? was a marathon, persevering past the usual authorial checkpoints of self-doubt and rejection. Even so, Hamdan didn’t seriously considered its publication for a long time.

The novel was merely a respite from the stresses of her work as a New York Times journalist and Google editor spread across multiple time zones, as well as the challenges of raising two children. She never thought writing fiction would ever be more than “a cute hobby.”

Her family, she says, as well as a series of unexpected opportunities, helped her overcome that mental barricade

In 2021, she was scrolling through Twitter when she came across a competition that was organised by Netflix. She submitted a section of the novel and won. It was a burst of encouragement that kept her going. Still, Hamdan was reluctant about calling herself a novelist. That changed after she participated in the 2023 run of the Emirates Literature Foundation’s Seddiqi First Chapter Fellowship.

“The fellowship was the reason I began to call myself a writer, even before I became published,” she says. “It didn't happen even with the Netflix award. But this time, I thought to myself, I'm going to be a novelist. I'm going to do this because I felt supported.”

The opportunity provided both mentorship as well as a sense of community. The programme paired her with established authors, offered structured feedback and helped transform her “cute hobby” into a serious pursuit. The network of peers, as well as the unwavering support of her family, gave her a sense of confidence to keep developing the novel into what it is today.

The support finally pushed her to a spotlight she never imagined. Earlier this month, What Will People Think? was shown on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and was selected as part of the comedian’s Book Club picks. Hamdan says she had no idea the book would end up on Fallon’s desk.

“In June, my publisher sent me an email saying that The Fallon Book Club had requested copies for them to read, for coverage consideration,” she says. “But we didn’t know what that meant.”

She only realised when she stumbled across Fallon’s Instagram post. “Last week I woke up, and I was just scrolling through Instagram, and the first thing that came up in my feed was Jimmy Fallon, and I remember thinking, ‘oh, I guess that means I didn’t make it, because my publisher would have told me’. So I just thought, let me see which books made it. So he holds the first one up. And then I look closer and I see mine on the side. And then I’m like, rubbing my eyes. And then he pulls mine. I’m like, ‘oh my God’.”

The news spread quickly. “It was just a total surprise. And then it felt like a wedding day, Christmas all rolled into one, because I just started getting messages from like, my friends and former colleagues and teachers I had in middle school. It felt like a big validation.”

While the moment was certainly a personal victory for Hamdan, it also is an encouraging sign that more Palestinian stories were entering mainstream Western media.

“I think it’s a signal to the market, you know, like this big pop culture icon is saying, ‘pay attention to this’, and it’s in his top five.”

Her novel’s presence on The Tonight Show proved that Palestinian characters, often relegated to the margins or exclusively confined to stories of conflict, could thrive in a romantic comedy, to tell jokes and fall in love even as they carried the weight of their history.

“We are more than our trauma, and it’s a hard thing to balance,” she says. “We are allowed to laugh. Joy is a basic human right.”