Author Salman Rushdie at the annual gala of PEN America on May 18, 2023.

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Ted Shaffrey/AP

Author Salman Rushdie at the annual gala of PEN America on May 18, 2023.

Ted Shaffrey/AP

On August 12, 2022, famed author Salman Rushdie was stabbed. He was on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, about to give a talk “about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm,” Rushdie writes in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

Rushdie, the 76-year-old writer of The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children, Victory City, and more, survived the attack. But not without some lasting scars, including being blind in one eye. Since the attack, he’s done a handful of interviews here and there, but he’s kept mostly to himself. In Knife, he details everything that’s been going on in his life and in his head since the attack. He talks about the recovery process, the support he received from loved ones, and his feelings about his alleged attacker, Hadi Matar.

Matar is in custody at Chautauqua County Jail, being charged with second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault. The judge in his case actually postponed Matar’s trial after Rushdie announced his memoir, in order to give Matar’s lawyers an opportunity to see what’s inside the book.

The book is out Tuesday. Here’s what you can expect from it:

1. Rushdie has no interest in re-litigating The Satanic Verses

Rushdie only makes a few mentions of his 1988 book that led the supreme leader of Iran at the time to call for Rushdie’s death. And, Rushdie notes in Knife, it wasn’t just the Muslim world criticizing Rushdie for writing the book. He calls out other names, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the writers Roald Dahl and Germaine Greer. Besides that, Rushdie writes that he’s said everything he’s needed to say about Satanic Verses in his previous memoir, Joseph Anton.” If anyone’s looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here,” he writes in Knife. “My novels can take care of themselves.”

2. The book is about freedom of speech, particularly aimed at the left

Rushdie instead saves his argumentative energy to make an appeal for freedom of speech – an ideal, he believes, progressives and the left have left behind to their detriment. “This move away from First Amendment principles allowed that venerable piece of Constitution to be co-opted by the right,” he writes. Rushdie had a long background in free speech advocacy. He’s the former president of PEN America, the literary rights advocacy group, and co-founded that organization’s World Voices Festival. His first public appearance after being attacked was at a PEN Gala in his honor. And, if anything, the attack has only furthered his positions. “Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist,” he writes.

3. It’s also a book about marriage

In 2021, Rushdie quietly married the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Rushdie is tender when he writes about the early days of their relationship, saying he was not looking for romance. “And then it came up behind me and whacked me behind the ear and I was powerless to resist.”

It’s Griffiths who helps Rushdie through the many doctor visits, physical therapy appointments, sleepless nights, mystery ailments and piling bills (a sub-takeaway could be, not even world-famous authors can avoid surprise medical bills), all while tending to her own writing career. There are tough moments that they have to go through together in the book, but there are also regular moments that could be scenes from any other marriage.

4. He tries to understand his attacker

Rushdie never refers to Matar by name in the book. And he maintains a certain distance from him. There’s a quick instance in the memoir where Rushdie toys with the idea of reaching out to Matar, but he quickly decides that’s a bad idea. Instead, Rushdie chooses a different route to understanding Matar that we won’t spoil here. But it is an exercise in deep empathy – one that seems to help Rushdie find at least a little bit of closure.

5. There’s a possible documentary on the way.

Early on in the book, Rushdie and Griffiths begin filming Rushdie’s thoughts. The plan seems to be to take all the footage and bring it to an experienced filmmaker, who can shape it into something. But there have been no announcements made on that front yet.

Diarra Kilpatrick stars as a school teacher-turned-mystery solver in Diarra from Detroit.

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Diarra Kilpatrick stars as a school teacher-turned-mystery solver in Diarra from Detroit.

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Detroit native Diarra Kilpatrick has always wanted to share her version of the city with the world: “For me, the gems of Detroit have far outweighed some of the more challenging aspects of growing up there,” the actor, writer and producer says.

Kilpatrick’s new BET+ series, Diarra from Detroit, is inspired, in part, by the time she spent as a little girl watching Columbo and Perry Mason with her grandmother. Kilpatrick notes that despite the fact that all the women in her life seemed to be obsessed with murder mystery shows back then, she never saw Black women driving the narrative.

Diarra from Detroit is a dark comedy about a public school teacher going through a divorce who decides to hit the dating scene. When a guy she meets on Tinder ghosts her, Diarra goes on a hunt to find out why — and winds up embroiled in a decades old mystery.

Kilpatrick says she was initially reluctant to use her own first name in the title for the show because she was concerned that the audience would assume she was simply being herself instead of playing a character. But as the show progressed in development, the decision began to feel right.

“It felt like it was like an announcement,” Kilpatrick says. “Almost, like ‘Diarra from Detroit is ready to be seen!’ ”

In addition to working on this latest series, Kilpatrick is an actor, writer and producer who created and starred in the ABC digital original satirical comedy American Koko, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award. She also co-starred for three seasons in the HBO period drama Perry Mason.

Interview Highlights

On her tendency to joke about dark things

My father, the only way to describe him is just a damn fool. He cannot take anything seriously. They say comedy is tragedy plus time. He doesn’t need the time. It’s just … funeral, joke. Someone’s hurt, joke. It’s never too soon, joke. So he just really doesn’t have the ability to take anything seriously. And I think my mom took everything really seriously and had a tremendous amount of depth of feeling and thought and everything. And so I think making sense of the two of those personalities within myself, has kind of been my lot. And I think making sense of comedy and depth is probably a hallmark of my work.

On casting Diarra from Detroit by listening to the actors’ voices

It’s in the voice. I could be playing auditions on the computer and walk away from the computer to get a cup of tea or something, and the voice will drive me back. We’re not really doing the vocal fry thing in the Midwest. We’re not really doing the pitching up thing in the Midwest. Detroit is a southern town up north for me. And so it’s that bit of southern in the voice, it’s that bit of bass in the voice. Assuredness in the voice. I could tell it immediately.

On learning to drop her Detroit accent in acting school, but then using it to get roles afterward

I went to theater school, too, and they beat me up pretty good when I first got there. … They were like, “Ma’am, what is this accent that you have? Your vowels are all over the place. You sound a hot mess.” … Even though I did love being at Tisch and that training, I didn’t love the kind of judgment that I felt about my accent and being the only Black girl in studio. It was like, “We got to fix that!” Because as soon as you graduate, no one’s asking you to speak the King’s English. As a dark skinned, Black, 20-something actress, they want your regional dialect. A lot of times you’re going out for Prostitute No. 4. They don’t need you to sound like you’re doing a Shakespearean play. So that part of it was interesting to kind of lose it and then kind of learn to regain it, because that’s what the industry was requiring of me. And I did wish that it had been framed that way for me in school. Like, there’s nothing wrong with your accent. In fact, you’re probably going to work more with your regional dialect and without it.

On seeing the beauty in her Detroit childhood

I grew up in the city. When I was really young, we didn’t have a lot of money. My mom and I lived in Section 8. We lived in Calumet Townhomes right off the Lodge Freeway. … I had a very idyllic childhood. I have a very pristine idea of what it was to grow up in that Section 8 housing community. And I think it was in part my imagination.

It’s not there now, but there used to be, right across from where I grew up, this big field. It was an empty field, and I would cut across that field to get to the corner store whenever my mother would bless me with a couple dollars to go get ice cream or whatever. And that field, in my imagination, in my mind, was honestly like Maria von Trapp, like The Sound of Music, like Austrian vistas and mountains. The grass was so high. I would go in that field and pick flowers for my mother. I would sing and dance and get lost in that field. And it wasn’t until I was much older that I was like, “That was an empty lot. The grass was mad high because it should have been cut. Those were dandelions. They’re not flowers.” There was a church bell that would ring. I was always like, this is magic, because I guess that’s just the love that I felt. And that’s just something about me.

So I do realize not everybody has that point of view on it. I’m able to see the beauty of it. I also am able to recognize that there are challenges and there are things there that need to be fixed. So I feel like I can make room for both.

On the “angry Black woman” stereotype

It is a trap. They have made us afraid of our anger. … But at the end of the day, anger is so beautiful and so powerful to me. Nothing changes unless someone gets angry. Obviously you don’t just want to aim a bunch of unwieldy anger all over the place. That’s not going to be constructive either. But there is great information in your anger. There’s great direction in your anger. And, of course, there’s great change that comes out of somebody being like, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” … I think that when Black women are afraid of it, it will siphon off some of your power and your intuition and your drive.

On seeing a mural for the show in Detroit

I got a chance to go to Detroit with my husband and my baby and my sister and my oldest friend in the world, and we stood out there and took pictures. And it was a beautiful moment. … I was trying to figure out how do I take a brick wall back on the plane with me? But it was a really beautiful moment. And I have to shout out Sydney James, who was a wonderful muralist in Detroit, who created it with her team. And I just try to keep my head down and do my work. I’ll try to listen for my assignment and just follow and be obedient to it. But there are those moments that kind of shake you, like, “Girl, you’re doing it. You’re doing it! Your face is on this whole wall!” That’s crazy. And it was a really touching, lovely moment.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.