The Window Seat

The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion
Aminatta Forna
read by the author
Recorded Books, May 18, 2021 (8 hours and 30 minutes)
Print edition published by Grove Press
$21.43 for Audible members, more for nonmembers
purchased with an Audible credit

I had never heard of Aminatta Forna when I saw this book mentioned. It turns out, however, that she is an established author of literary fiction who has won multiple awards. Where have I been?

Forna grew up with a complex family situation. Her father was an African from Sierra Leone, and her mother was Scottish. They divorced when she was very young and both quickly remarried. Her father married a woman from Sierra Leone and her mother married a man who worked for the United Nations, but who was from New Zealand. Her father was politically active in Sierra Leone, and was eventually arrested and then executed. Forna’s stepfather was posted to various countries around the world, and was serving in Iran when the Shah left the country and Ayatollah Khomeini returned. Forna was living with her mother and stepfather in Iran in the midst of these events.

The author describes various aspects of her life in these exquisitely written and wide-ranging essays. The title essay is also the opening essay. She opens the book with the statement, “Here are four words you rarely hear these days: I love to fly.” She has that right. Certainly any of us who have had occasion to fly since 9/11 are not fond of the process. Forna, however, writes about the pleasure of flying as an unaccompanied minor. She did a lot of that, as her father insisted that she be schooled in England. She describes how well the airlines treated unaccompanied minors in earlier decades.

In another essay she discusses the similarities between the way her parents and Barack Obama’s parents met. Both had to do with westerners assisting in African development and becoming acquainted with the locals.

Forna’s writing can cover a lot of ground in a single essay. In one essay she discusses contemporary bias against people of color and then describes how the slave trade was managed in West Africa in the eighteenth century. In another, she starts with a discussion of urban foxes in London and moves on to describing the proliferation of coyotes in the United States. (They’re not only in the West.)

The author also provides some delightful travelogue. Forna writes about how she and her brother took their mother on a trip to the Orkney and Shetland islands in Northern Scotland before she could no longer travel.

Given that she reads her own work one might wonder what sort of accent the author with an African father and a Scottish mother might have. The answer lies in the fact that her entire schooling was in England. (“I went to boarding school [in England] at six and left at eighteen for university in London.”) Forna, then, reads with a clipped English accent, but she doesn’t hold back emotion when emotion is appropriate. This is certainly the case in an angry essay about the perils of women walking alone in the city.

If you decide Window Seat is your cup of tea, and I hope you do, the audiobook is a superb option.