Despite its name, Three Parties (Penguin Random House), the debut novel by Vancouver-based author Ziyad Saadi, isn’t all fun and festivities. Restrained by the self-made parameters of a single, significant day – protagonist Firas’ birthday, surprise coming out party, and impromptu celebration of an unexpected work promotion – Three Parties is bursting at the literary seams with familial tension, unprovoked and ill-timed drama, spiralling anxiety, relationship awkwardness, and deep-rooted trauma.

After an early reading of Three Parties in advance of its publication on August 26th (aka today!), we reached out to Saaid to field some burning, difficult, and (of course) food-related questions:

First of all, please introduce yourself to Scout readers, in your own words: Who are you? What is your background? Where are you currently based? And what is keeping you busy these days?

I’m a Palestinian Canadian writer, filmmaker, and activist from Montreal, currently based in Vancouver. Lately I’ve been spending most of my days writing, reading, cooking, stretching, and bracing myself for the news.

Three Parties takes place over the course of a single – but heavily loaded and insanely busy – day. Why did you choose to use this device for your debut novel? What were the advantages and challenges of putting such a restriction on yourself when writing this story?

The purpose of having it take place over a single day is two-fold. First, the fact that Firas only has one day to ensure that every aspect of his party goes off without a hitch, only to be met with several dozen hitches, adds to the already intense pressure he’s put on himself as he plans to do this very big and scary thing. Second, Firas isn’t just dealing with the present day but also with everything that has happened to him and that might happen to him. The past and the future are his biggest burdens, especially as they manage to insert themselves into the present day and meld into one another in a way that renders his journey all the more disorienting. It was definitely tricky packing so many elements into a single-day story, because you don’t want clutter that prompts confusion or apathy from the reader; on the other hand, this narrative device helped put me in Firas’ mindset, as I imagined the toll that so much simultaneous chaos would take on a person’s mental and emotional well-being, especially at that age.

The majority of Three Parties is told through Firas’ perspective…but occasionally the reader is also allowed glimpses into the mind of Maysa, the Dareer family’s housekeeper and Firas’ unexpected ally. Why did you choose this character in particular to slip into? What does her perspective add to the story that a strictly Firas-narrated one would be missing?

In a story where the element of Time plays such a big role, it was important to transport readers to an era before Firas was even born. His story is a Palestinian one, and it would be incomplete without a glimpse into the life of someone who has actually lived through as harrowing a period in Palestinian history as the Nakba, which connects, on multiple levels, to his own past in Palestine and his present in the US. That the person whose trauma is revealed happens to be someone he loathes makes the narrative dissonance all the more relevant and necessary.

Firas spends a lot of time in his head – spiralling, extrapolating, calculating, postulating, and planning. By the final chapters, my stress level was sympathetically through the roof! However, he is overall very good at containing his inner chaos and being an all-around adaptable and affable person, as a survival mechanism and in order to navigate his way through life without causing too much disruption or drawing attention to himself. I imagine that spending so much time inhabiting the character of Firas wasn’t an easy task! What was the process of writing like for you? How easy was it to step into and out of character while writing Three Parties?

It was surprisingly fun. I often try to include humour in my writing in order to counter the very dark and depressing world we currently live in. The way that Firas focuses so fervently on things that nobody in their right mind would even notice let alone care about made the trauma and tragedy of the novel much easier to write. That said, there were definitely times where I felt like, in writing this novel, I was taking on as much as he was, making sure every element of my story worked exactly as it needed to, even as I doubted what the end goal even was.

On the surface, it’s easy to draw parallels between yourself and Firas, a queer Palestinian-American. But I’m betting that the reality is actually more complicated. Please set me straight: What, if any, similarities are there between you and the character of Firas, and his experiences? How important is it to you to write from a place of “knowing”, and giving a voice to a queer Palestinian-American experience?

As is often the case with debut novels, much of the characterization is based on my own traits. While there are definitely some differences between Firas and me – more on that shortly – I do tend to overthink things as a way of trying to control what I very much can’t control, oftentimes with the mindset that the worst possible thing that could happen will absolutely happen. That’s obviously a very difficult way to live, and writing the character of Firas was both triggering and therapeutic. As far as his experiences go, we very much differ. There was only one small thing in the novel that actually happened to me, and the rest is all fiction. I wouldn’t have been able to write this story had it resembled my real life, in part because it would have been admittedly much less interesting. The result is that there was just enough distance between us for me to have a clear picture of where I needed to take his story. I think the idea of writing from a place of first-hand knowledge needs only to apply to the characterization rather than the plot or setting. As long as you know what it’s like to be a Palestinian in a country that dehumanizes Palestinians, or a queer person in a family that has shown disdain for queers, you’ll have the necessary voice to tell a story like this.

“Once I realized that the queer and Palestinian identities, among others, are inseparable within me, I quickly realized that they were inseparable in the world around me as well. Each of us reflects a small part of the world back to our fellow human beings, and in doing so, we show that, despite the differences therein, it’s all one struggle.”

After the completion of Three Parties, how difficult was it for you to step away from Firas, as well as the other characters? Any plans to revisit any of them in the future?

I would love a Maysa spin-off novel! I wouldn’t be the one to write it; however, I would want another Palestinian to take that baton. In the end, I didn’t feel it was too hard for me to step away from Firas, because I feel like I took his story to where it needed to go. Once I feel that sense of completion, it’s easy for me to let go of a character and move on to the next one. I’m currently working on my second novel, and I’m happy to report that no thoughts of Firas have entered my mind so far.

I’m not surprised that you are also a filmmaker, since it was very easy to visualize Three Parties playing out in my head as I read it. What do you get from writing that you don’t get from filmmaking, and vice versa? How do you know that an idea is a good fit for one medium over the other?

In novels, you get to explore to great depths what goes on inside a person’s head, and with a character like Firas, who’s in his own head quite a lot, that gives me a great deal to work with that I could never take advantage of in film. On the other hand, in a novel, it can be difficult to write out the dialogue in a way that flows, particularly as you seldom know who’s talking or what tone they’re talking in without adding “so-and-so said sheepishly.” That adds to the pressure of ensuring that you capture each character’s voice as distinctly as possible. On top of that, without the camera, you need to dig deep into your arsenal of vocabulary to not only clarify for your reader the journey you’re taking them on, but also carry them through it so it feels as effortless as sitting back and watching a screen. My descriptions in a screenplay could be utterly bland and the final audience would never know, which is why I find screenplays much easier to write.

Any motivation to bring Three Parties to life by transforming it into a film at some point in the future?

I would love to turn Three Parties into a film; and in fact that was the goal from the beginning, which is probably why it feels so easy to visualize despite it being so character-centric. I would ideally like to turn most, if not all, of my future novels into films, but it’s important not to force one towards the other. If I feel I can alter a book to make it more visually accessible without losing the essence of what made it a great story, I know an adaptation is worthy. If I feel a film has wells to tap into that I won’t be able to depict visually or coherently, I know l should go the novel route first.

I can’t talk about Three Parties without bringing up the topic of parties, of course! What was your most disastrous party incident? Best party you’ve ever attended? Best one you’ve ever thrown?

So the one thing in the novel that did actually happen to me in real life was the part about a birthday party that I was going to have when I was a kid, where, a few days before the special day, I discovered that none of the kids I’d invited were going to show. That led me to cancel it. Sort of a “you didn’t dump me, I dumped YOU!” kind of strategy. That may not sound disastrous, but when you’re a kid, it’s easy to take something like that quite hard. I’ve literally never thrown a party since! Although, to be honest, at this point it’s only because the thought of preparing everything before a party and cleaning everything after just seems like a lot of work for something I don’t particularly enjoy. The best parties I’ve attended have typically been smaller and more intimate, especially wrap parties after a film shoot with a crew you’ve grown close to.

Firas puts a lot of attention into every detail of his birthday/coming out party – including the multi-course menu he is planning on serving his guests. What kind of cook are you? Do you have a go-to dish that you make when entertaining a crowd? What food makes you feel the most nostalgic?

I am sad to inform you that I’m actually a mediocre cook. You’ll eat my food and be satiated, but you won’t get excited about eating it. I don’t entertain much, but when I do, my go-to dish is pad see ew, albeit the version of it you get in fast-food restaurants where the cultural authenticity is highly dubious. I get nostalgic about certain sweets I used to eat when I was a kid, which I may or may not but definitely still do consume on a regular basis.

Depression/mental health, sexuality, gender roles, fidelity, classism, family relationships, otherness, home, death, suicide, grief, aging – there are a lot of ‘difficult’ themes addressed in the relatively short space of 306 pages. Why hit on so many themes at once, versus honing in on one issue specifically?

It is one issue. All of these issues are interconnected, and it’s Firas’ inability to see this that ends up pulling him in so many different directions. Firas’ struggles are reflected in every other character in his life, but it’s all so overwhelming that it sometimes becomes impossible to really notice. Once I realized that the queer and Palestinian identities, among others, are inseparable within me, I quickly realized that they were inseparable in the world around me as well. Each of us reflects a small part of the world back to our fellow human beings, and in doing so, we show that, despite the differences therein, it’s all one struggle.

This is a standard (but fun!) question I like to ask all of my interviewees: Building a menu can also be a kind of “storytelling”. With that in mind, please describe to me your life in menu courses – up to one for each decade of your life, from childhood to adolescence, early adulthood, and current day.

In a way, I’d say that life unfolds in the exact opposite order of a four-course meal…