About the book

The Making of The Boat Runner

I believe you have to grasp onto a wide variety of experiences and embrace all aspects of your life to write the book you're meant to write. Novels are gifts from one person to an unknowable other. It is why I'm an awful critic. I have nothing bad to say about someone who attempted the form, who lived the life to tell the story. Since writing The Boat Runner, I understand exactly what Gustave Flaubert meant when describing his infamous character, Madame Bovary. "It's me," he said. "C'est moi." You put everything of yourself into a book.

When I poured everything of myself into The Boat Runner, I was surprised the story centered on a character who morphed into a well-intentioned Dutch smuggler. But then I really began going over the details of my own life and this character emerged and seemed inevitable.

My mother, who is an artist, was born in occupied Holland in 1942. At twenty-one she came to the United States as a nanny to the Dutch Consulate in San Francisco, where she met and married my American father, who is a philosophy professor. They moved around the country for years until I was born near Buffalo, New York, where I grew up feeling distanced from a sense of family history. This meant everything about both sides of my family, especially the Dutch side, was a source of mystery.

The most fascinating, shadowy figure from my maternal family was my Dutch grandfather, Hans Jonker, who passed when my mother was nineteen. Hans was a Renaissance man who played the violin, bred new strands of orchids, and painted in his spare time. For the majority of his career, however, he was a head electrical engineer at Phillips where he ran a radio tube lab. During WWII, he was forced into hiding to avoid conscription by the Germans who wanted all engineers and scientists for high-level military work. There were rumors that he'd sought refuge in a monastery, fled to England, or was killed. This meant my Oma, while caring for my mother and her three other daughters during wartime, would go out looking for her husband. This story sat latent in my mind for years.

While I was in my twenties and working at sea, feeling farther from my own family than ever before, I started calling home from pay phones around the world to ask my family direct questions. Why were we so transient? Who were my relatives? What was Hans Jonker really like? As it turned out, my mother had old letters, paintings, pictures, and haunting stories from her father and her own life that I'd never heard. My mother shared memories of GIs giving her chocolate in the streets of liberated Holland that fascinated me. Most importantly, I found out she has scar tissue on her ears from bombings near her home when she was an infant. The damage to her ears went undiagnosed her whole childhood, and she spent her school years having a hard time hearing in classrooms. Paying attention was a challenge, so she took to entertaining herself, drawing and creating art. My mother would go on to become a career artist who welded giant sculptures from discarded steel, and painted the most incredible images with pastels and acrylics that hung on the walls of our home. This inspired the need for art and creativity in the Koopman family.

These nuanced understandings of my heritage snuck into my writing, and then strangely empowered me to employ events from my own life—specifically, the more than three years I spent working various jobs on a half dozen small international expedition ships. I love ships, living on ships, the sea, and traveling, and the spirit of that experience has very much informed this book. In my twenties, I saw shipping ports in every corner of the world, and witnessed how ships hold the potential to change the direction of any life at any time.

I later married into a large Jewish family in Chicago, and in doing so, became very close to my wife's two grandfathers, who are now both in their nineties. One lived on and off vessels as a frogman in the Pacific campaign of WWII, and the other had been a medic who helped liberate the camps in Europe. I've had long conversations with them and used their stories to understand different perspectives and religious backgrounds when writing about the war. At a family party, the medic, Joe Sheade, took out pictures the size of a stick of gum that showed heaps of pajama-clad bodies taken from the liberated death camps. He's kept these photos in his wallet for over seventy years. "So I don't ever forget," he said. His willingness to look directly at something so ugly to keep perspective haunted me.

Then the last piece of the puzzle for me was research, which I did a lot of. Almost everything I discovered, story I heard, or event I learned of that took place during the war became something I held up and asked, "Would this show the impossibly complex and ethically messy reality of one Dutch family's life during the war?"

Yet, even after all this, my editor challenged me to go back and revise with an eye for moral and personal dilemmas for Jacob. It was with this in mind that I wrote the scene where the boys at camp lead Jacob to the burn pits to toss rocks at the rats. One of the boys makes an offensive comment, comparing the rats to a Jewish propaganda poster, and, both desperate to fit in and relieved not to have been the focus of these boys' menace, Jacob agrees. He is immediately reminded of his beloved Jewish teacher who called out, "Yeladim," to gather him and his classmates, and he is flooded with guilt. This is this scene that troubles me the most. This scene arrived from my own children's teacher calling to them, "Yeladim," this word that breaks my heart with the love and care it sings out. It has become my favorite word, and after writing that scene, and knowing it was right for the book, it hurt, and still hurts. It makes me uneasy to include those anti-Semitic sentiments, something I feared readers would judge both Jacob for allowing and me for writing. But I felt that I needed to push all cowardice and self-censorship away when writing The Boat Runner. These events were ugly, to be sure, which is why we must look and look closely at them.

This is very much a work of fiction, but it is built upon a historical and personal scaffolding of real people and true events. Now, I hope others will read this book and see this family's impossible situation, and how the circumstances that create great upheavals have morphed through time, jumping borders, races, and oceans. I hope this book does its job and entertains, evokes empathy for others, and leaves you more alert to those around you and the unique depths of their lives. But more than anything, I hope this story connects some unknowable reader to the receding shadows of our past, especially those of the darkest times, which is where we learn how essential it is to find the power of our own voice.