Ida Hegazi Høyer - Selected Title Author

What is your book about? And what inspired you to write this book?

One morning in April 2023, a neighbor called to tell me he’d found my father on the ground out in the garage. Despite being critically ill, my father refused to call a doctor; he only wanted to be helped inside the house and left alone. Standing by his bed later that day, I understood how serious his condition was. He was barely responsive, and it was clear that he wouldn’t last much longer. “I’m calling an ambulance right now,” I said. My father, with a glazed look in his eyes but a firm voice, replied: “No, you aren’t.”

It was after this incident that I began writing the first texts that would eventually lead to this book. I’d never intended to write about him, about my family in general, or about my own life, but now, a number of questions arose. My father had his first heart attack when I was ten years old. He’d been sick for almost as long as I could remember. All my life, I had been scared of him dying – and all my life, I had been preparing myself. Now, when he actually seemed to be dying, it was hard to untangle these feelings. How prepared was I, really? Had I been waiting for this? And who were we, my father and I – what kind of relationship had we really had?

Since my father is from Egypt and his entire family lives in Cairo, and since I don’t have any siblings, I’ve always been the person closest to him. He’s needed a great deal of assistance, I’ve been the only one around to help, and it hasn’t always been easy to distinguish between compassion and obligation. This book portrays not only a father-daughter relationship, but also the roles of the sick and the people around them. It’s about the journeys, situations, and conflicts that develop along the way. It’s about our lives – and what being the child of an immigrant can mean. During the writing process, I’ve come to realize how little I actually relate to Egypt. I’ve been to Cairo many times to visit family, but it still feels as though anything related to the country doesn’t exist in my everyday life in Norway. Without knowing why, my relationship to my father’s country is a non-relationship. And the more I think about it, the more disturbing the distance becomes. It is precisely this distance the book is trying to make sense of: how foreign we – despite everything – have been to one another, in the midst of all our closeness.

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