A War Reporter Finds Her Refuge in Fiction

PARIS — On Friday, Nov. 13, 2015, Wendell Steavenson, the war reporter and food writer, was in Tbilisi, Georgia, to film an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s foodie travel series “Parts Unknown.” She’d gone to bed early.

The next morning Steavenson woke up to discover a stream of emails in her inbox. “It was Paris: 130 dead,” she said. “I was just like, ‘I’m in the wrong place.'”

Bourdain had to get along without Steavenson, who made her apologies and jumped on the earliest available flight to Paris. That evening she was filing the first of several stories on the Paris terrorist attacks for The New Yorker’s website. A 47-year-old Anglo-American, Steavenson was no stranger to the City of Lights. She moved to the Montmartre district in 2007, and has been living there on and off ever since. A few weeks ago, we sat down in a busy cafe in her neighborhood.

Steavenson is the author of three nonfiction books, including “Circling the Square: Stories From the Egyptian Revolution,” which came out in 2015. She has now written her first novel: “Paris Metro,” which will be released Tuesday. When we met she was huddled up against the cold in a tawny fur-covered jacket; a chunky yellow G-Shock water-resistant watch adorned her wrist, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses sat snugly on her nose. Her original intention had been to write a nonfiction book about the January 2015 massacre at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

“I was under contract, but the reporting was slow and a bit sticky,” she said. “I didn’t feel comfortable trying to push people who had been traumatized by this horrific attack to talk, because it just felt so intrusive.” Then the November attacks happened and she decided to drop the Charlie Hebdo book altogether. “The November attacks felt to me somehow broader, and I thought: Why not lose the novel complex?” Steavenson said. “I always wanted to write fiction, and though journalism wasn’t a detour, the first intention was always to write good stories.”

When a novel’s protagonist resembles its author — as in “Paris Metro,” where character Catherine Kitteridge, or Kit, happens to be an Anglo-American war reporter living in Paris — it can be tempting to ask how autobiographical it is. “Weirdly, I made the whole thing up,” said Steavenson, laughing. “There was just a great and wonderful freedom in it.”

Her novel opens in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis as French police are about to raid a house where several suspected terrorists have sought refuge. Kit is there to report on the siege for an unnamed American newspaper. She has developed the habit of saving her stories under the names of Paris Metro stations, like Voltaire and Bonne Nouvelle — “the better to confound hotel-room spies or officers at border crossings” — hence the novel’s title.

“Paris Metro” also takes place in Baghdad, Beirut and the Greek island Kos. Paris is supposed to be Kit’s sanctuary: a place where she can raise her adopted Iraqi son in peace after years of covering violent conflicts. But when she loses a close friend in the Charlie Hebdo attack, the liberal values she has always believed in are replaced by an insidious advent of fear and loathing. “It’s a great danger when something unpleasant happens that you lash out and your blame becomes generalized, which is what Kit does,” Steavenson said. “She wakes up when she realizes what damage she has been inflicting on her son.”

Steavenson, who studied history at Cambridge University, has been reporting on the Middle East since 2002. She has had tours in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and reported from Lebanon during the war in 2006. She lived for a year and a half in Cairo during the Arab Spring and also spent a year in Jerusalem. “I felt like I had a unique viewpoint from having spent a lot of time in the Middle East and then being in Paris and seeing the aftermath of the terrorist attacks,” she said. “The novel was a way to describe all these shards of conversation, of complaint and different reactions.”

Steavenson cited Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” as her touchstone novels. “In all three each cog of the plot turns the next and everything is just very well organized,” she said. “Psychologically they’re fascinating about how you get from one place to another.” When Steavenson began to write “Paris Metro” she asked her agent to get in touch with Matt Weiland, a senior editor at W.W. Norton & Co. More than a decade earlier, Weiland had been working for the magazine Granta and had edited three of Steavenson’s long-form reported pieces from Iraq and Lebanon.

“When reporters want to write fiction I usually run for the hills,” Weiland said in a telephone interview. “But going back to those Granta pieces, what Wendy’s writing evinced was just an incredibly natural eye for character and a great sense of crafting scenes. Very quickly she got close to the people she was meeting and talking with, and you felt as though you knew them and you cared about them. I think that’s a mark of what the finest novels can or should do.” She has been lined up to give some readings of “Paris Metro” in Washington, Boston and New York. She was born in Manhattan (her mother is a New Yorker, and her father, who died two years ago, was British) and lived there for a few years during her 20s. So it will be a homecoming of sorts. “Though I didn’t grow up there, I would say that I’m a New Yorker in my heart,” she said. “I want matzo ball soup, and it makes me annoyed when Europeans walk slowly on the sidewalk.”

Steavenson is now working on her second novel, which she said is about “mothers and daughters, genetics, nature and nurture.” The first half is set in Manhattan during the 1960s and the second half in Europe 20 years later. She is also getting an itch to do some reporting again, but “in a different way” than before. “I’m a bit less: Must go to Mosul,” she said. “I’m more scared. I don’t know if it got scarier. I think it did. You just see the toll it takes, and you lose too many people. There are too many people close to you kidnapped. I got scareder, no doubt about it.”