Amanda Rizkalla: “Hungered” | Oprah’s Book Club

Oprah Winfrey (0:01)

This episode of the Oprah Podcast is presented by our partner, Geico. I love the fact that your book, Hungered, illustrate that hardworking people who are trying and doing everything that we've been told to do to be a part of the American dream can end up with no shelter.

Amanda Rizkalla (0:19)

Exactly. Before any of this happened, we had a very comfortable, stable life, but we still lost our housing, so it can really happen to anyone.

Oprah Winfrey (0:27)

What do you want readers to know about your intention for the ending of the book? Because I know a lot of people, including my friend Gail, is like, what? What kind of ending is that?

Amanda Rizkalla (0:37)

I know.

Amber (0:37)

I've heard that from so many people. What kind of ending?

Oprah Winfrey (0:39)

I don't even understand that.

Amanda Rizkalla (0:41)

I don't blame them at all. Hello.

Oprah Winfrey (0:46)

Welcome. So glad you're joining me here on the Oprah Podcast. You all know, I've been saying that it's the 30th anniversary of my book club. And I have to say, again, it's all because of you, phenomenal readers, who have come along for the journey. I sit in the space of just pure gratitude. This little idea we had back in my office 30 years ago, Alice McGee, my producer at the time, and I, has expanded to millions of readers and books sold around the world. And now, we arrive at my 125th book pick. Wow!

It's called Hungered. It is a poignant and beautifully told story that takes us inside the world of families who are unhoused. Hungered is masterfully written in a way that allows for humor and compassion, also some hope and some joy within a family trying to just survive day-to-day.

That is not easy to do. So it is my great pleasure to welcome debut novelist and Steinbeck Fellowship recipient, really, Amanda Rizkalla. Amanda, thank you so much.

Amanda Rizkalla (2:06)

Thank you so much for having me.

Oprah Winfrey (2:07)

First of all, you're so young, and I read you started writing Hungered, really, as a college assignment, when you were just 19?

Amanda Rizkalla (2:14)

Yes.

Oprah Winfrey (2:15)

Where did the idea come from?

Amanda Rizkalla (2:17)

So I started, as you said, started writing this book when I was a sophomore in college, and I had this deadline I needed to meet, the short story assignment that was due, and at the time, the writing advice that was floating around was a mix of write what you know, and write those stories that only you can tell in a way that only you can tell it.

And so, initially, I used this assignment of the short story as a way to make sense of this experience of housing and security that I experienced when I was a teenager. But the more I studied fiction, the more I learned that storytelling actually requires more than that, has to be more than just a way to make sense of difficult things like a diary. And so I decided to use my experience as a jumping-off point to invent these characters and get at evoking what this experience felt like instead of beat for beat, you know, eliciting.

Oprah Winfrey (3:14)

This happened and this happened.

Amanda Rizkalla (3:15)

Exactly.

Oprah Winfrey (3:16)

So tell me, tell us what actually happened to you when you were a teenager. You were unhoused for a time?

Amanda Rizkalla (3:22)

Yes. When my parents decided to get to separate, my mom, brother and I decided that it would be best if we started a new chapter in our lives. And so we decided to move away.

And this is around the time of the recession. It was a few years after actually the recession. And so finances were tight for a lot of people, including us. And we ended up losing our housing. And when that happened, we had to quickly learn how to rely on each other in ways that we could not have anticipated.

Oprah Winfrey (3:57)

How old were you?

Amanda Rizkalla (3:58)

I was around 13 or so. I was in eighth grade.

Oprah Winfrey (4:01)

And your brother was?

Amanda Rizkalla (4:02)

He was two years younger than me.

Oprah Winfrey (4:04)

Okay. All right. So at 13, when this happens, it's just life-shattering, I would think, because you have to explain or deny and try to hide from your friends and the people at school about what's going on with you.

Amanda Rizkalla (4:23)

Right.

Right. There's a sense that a lot of this experience felt invisible. And it's something I wanted to capture in the book as well, that there's this really big paradox to an experience like this. The paradox being that in the book, this experience has completely upended and disrupted Sofia's life, but it has done so in a way that is almost entirely invisible to the people around her. Her friends at school have no idea that this is happening. Her teachers don't know, and the effect that has is it makes this really loud, disruptive experience actually pass over very quietly and feel all the more isolating and alienating because of that.