Lihi Lapid, whose latest novel, On Her Own, was just published in the US by HarperVia, has a very unusual biography for a writer.
While she is the author of a previous novel, Woman of Valor, which was also published in English to positive reviews, and several other books that came out in Israel, she is known around the world as the wife of Israel’s previous prime minister, Yair Lapid, now head of the opposition.
As we meet in the café at the Israel Museum, a convenient location for the Tel Aviv-based novelist, who is set to attend a rally to protest the policies of the current government outside the Knesset in a few hours, where her husband will speak, many people recognize her and wish her well.
Lapid acknowledged them gracefully, displaying the poise that she has acquired in a life in the harsh Israeli political spotlight. “I’m very involved in supporting Yair, not in terms of political decisions, but going out and campaigning,” she said. Still, it was important to her to keep writing, and she did much of her work “in the twilight zone of the early morning hours,” during bouts of insomnia.
As the well-wishers drifted away, before I could ask a question, she turned to me with one of her own, one that any author would ask: How did I like the book?
My answer, that I thought it was a moving and suspenseful story, filled with beautiful writing and vivid scenes, and that I fell in love with the three complex women at its center, pleased her as if she were a first-time writer, and led me into my first question: Where did she get the idea for it?
The plot of the novel
On Her Own is about Nina, a teenage girl from Sderot born to Irena, a Ukrainian immigrant and single mother. A smart girl, Nina is nevertheless seduced by Johnny, a smalltime gangster who brings her for trysts to a Tel Aviv hotel.
One night when she is with him there, she witnesses a violent crime he is involved in, and she flees and takes refuge with Carmela.
Carmela is a lonely widow with dementia who has buried one son, a fallen soldier, and whose other son is busy with his family in America. Carmela has moments that are partly dementia and partly wishful thinking when she feels that her late son is still alive.
She has also been dreaming that Dana, her granddaughter will come to visit, and when Nina shows up at her door, she foggily embraces the girl, thinking – or hoping – that she is the grandchild she hasn’t seen in years. Meanwhile, Irena frantically searches for her daughter on the eve of the Passover holiday.
She created these characters and told their stories through a complex writing process that took her several years. One inspiration was from a poem by Giora Fisher about a bereaved father with dementia. Lapid quoted the lines: “Don’t tell me, oy, but he’s been gone a long time/Tell me, he just went out and he’ll be back soon.”
For her, this was the “most heartbreaking poem I’ve ever heard.... When I heard that poem, I knew that was the essence of Carmela, that she wants to be in that place where in just a moment, he’ll return.”
Nina came to life for her in a more circuitous route, when she imagined a teenage girl who is fleeing from a world of danger who meets Carmela on the stairs.
For a long time, she had only vague thoughts about this scene and couldn’t figure out what the rest of the story should be. She spoke with a woman who worked as a counselor at a center run by Elem, for at-risk youth, about how girls like Nina are preyed on by men like Johnny. “And she told me, ‘It doesn’t happen all at once.’.... Gradually, girls are drawn into this world.”
She also spent time speaking to single mothers who were recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. “One woman I have known for years. She is so talented and so smart, she has two children from different fathers, she gets up early, she works all day in the store so that her children will have a future.
She lives for them.... And she exists almost completely in a Russian-speaking world.”
Her brother, Deddy, who lived in the US for decades, was an inspiration for the character, Itamar, Carmela’s son who lives in America. Lapid’s brother passed away from cancer after the book was finished and the book is dedicated to him. “We were very close.... He knew me better than I know myself. He knew I would become a writer before I knew.”
Lapid may seem to be the ultimate Tel Aviv insider, and at first, it is surprising that she wrote about characters who live on the margins of society, but as you speak to her more, you begin to understand that she can identify with these characters because she also grew up feeling like an outsider.
Born in Arad, a town where “you visit for a minute to get a cup of coffee and to go to the bathroom when the bus stops on the way to Masada,” she moved with her parents, who ran a Judaica store, to the Tel Aviv area when she was in her teens and struggled to fit in.
“The distance between a place like Sderot or Arad and Tel Aviv can be even longer than the distance between Tel Aviv and New York,” she noted.
Working as a photojournalist in Tel Aviv after the army, when she first met and then married Yair, she initially felt intimidated by his distinguished family. Yair Lapid was an actor and author at that time, and his father, Tommy Lapid, was a politician and a journalist, while his mother, Shulamit Lapid, is an acclaimed novelist.
“I took literature courses at the university to keep up with them, so I wouldn’t seem like an idiot at their family dinners, where they spoke about literature and art all the time.”
She turned to writing after she suffered two miscarriages and was put on bedrest when she was pregnant with her son, Lior, and needed a way to express herself that didn’t involve running around Tel Aviv on a motorcycle with a camera.
“When Lior was born, I understood that no newspaper is looking for a photographer who has to nurse every four hours.”
Another way in which Lapid looks at the world differently from how you might expect is that her daughter, Yael, is on the autism spectrum. I have known Lapid slightly for many years because I also have a son on the spectrum the same age as her daughter, and she is the president of SHEKEL, an organization for people with special needs in Israel.
Both of the Lapids have been upfront about their struggles raising their daughter. At first, after Yael’s diagnosis, Lapid was consumed by trying to help her, to the exclusion of everything else. “I was a wreck, I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t want to work, I just wanted to save her, I tried to do everything for her.... There was a very dramatic moment, where Yair said to me, ‘You have other children who need you.
And you have me, and I need you. Yaeli will be who she is for life, she’s not a project for a couple of years, it’s not like she’ll go swimming with dolphins and then everything will be fine.... This has to go back to being a happy home.’”
Now, having a special-needs daughter is an important part of who she is, but not her full identity. “I am connected to Yael,” she said. “I will always need to be there for her. But I’m also a writer, I’m also Lior’s mother and Yair’s wife. I’m also a friend.”
It was interesting for her to write the sections about Nina and Irena’s relationship, because her relationship with her daughter is very different. “I have a daughter I can’t fight with the way Irena and Nina fight in the book.”
One aspect of the response to her book in Israel that has pleased her is that, “People have said, it’s so Israeli.” Now that it has been published in English, she isn’t afraid that readers in other countries will find it too Israeli and won’t be able to relate to it. “It’s like reading a book from abroad, a book like The Kite Runner, and it’s wonderful that it gives you an authentic glimpse into another world, a window into the life of someone completely different.”
Just before heading off to the rally, she said that since October 7, she felt that the story of the bereaved mother in the novel was even more relevant. “Every time I see a picture of a soldier who has been killed, I think, there’s another mother like Carmela now, who will miss him for 30 or 40 years, who won’t be able to feel happy for 30 or 40 years.
They are soldiers, but they are also our children.... Now that the book is being published in English, I think people who read it outside of Israel will have a greater understanding of what it means to be Israeli, of the price we pay for our life here, that’s very meaningful to me.”