Hard Conversations: A book celebrates James Foley and confronts a kidnapper

•  MAX UFBERG

Among the scattered notes taped to the door of the Irish author Colum McCann’s home office in Manhattan is a photograph of James Foley, the American journalist who was murdered by members of the Islamic State in August 2014. In the picture, he leans against a barricade of sandbags in jeans and a flak vest, reading McCann’s novel “Let the Great World Spin.”

McCann was so moved when he saw the image shortly after James Foley’s death that he reached out to Diane Foley, his mother, to offer his condolences — and his help telling her son’s story, should she ever want it. But Foley missed the message. She was busy creating the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, an organisation focused on protecting journalists and ensuring the freedom of Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad. And she was still grieving a son who had been held kidnapped while covering the Syrian civil war and held for 21 months before he was executed on camera, with the footage then released online.

Then, in 2021, McCann and Foley found themselves on the same Zoom call. It was for a Marquette University book club; the group was reading another of McCann’s novels, “Apeirogon,” and Marquette was James Foley’s alma mater, so his mother had been invited. This time, they connected. “It was serendipitous,” Foley said, seated next to McCann in his living room, in Manhattan. “Colum reminded me of Jim in a lot of ways, just in his goodness and his ability to put very profound feelings into words.” Within a month of their Zoom call, McCann was visiting the Foleys’ New Hampshire home to discuss what would eventually become “American Mother,” a hybrid of biography and memoir released in the United States by Etruscan Press on March 5.

“I tried to be in Diane’s head,” McCann said of their collaboration. He would send Foley chapters and she would reply, offering direction, corrections and clarifications. That McCann was interested in the Foleys’ story comes as no surprise; many of his novels are based on real people and events. “Let the Great World Spin,” for example, touches on Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk across the Twin Towers in 1974, and “Apeirogon” is about the relationship between Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and the Palestinian scholar Bassam Aramin. But unlike those books, “American Mother” is a non-fiction account. “It’s kind of unique in my experience,” said Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of novels such as “The Hours” and “Day,” speaking about “American Mother.” “It’s a novelist writing about an actual event with a depth and thoroughness that you never get from the news.” Searching for another such paragon, Cunningham volunteered Truman Capote’s 1959 classic “In Cold Blood.”

Structurally, “American Mother” is an unusual book. Its first and third sections are told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator and focused on a series of exchanges between Foley and Alexanda Kotey, the British-born Islamic State militant who in 2022 was sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge for playing a key role in James Foley’s murder as well as in the deaths of three other American hostages.