NEW YORK — In May, Nauset Press released the debut novel First Rule of Fire by author Rebecca Gopoian.
The book is an intergenerational story told in three narratives, spanning from the Ottoman Empire 1914 at the start of the Armenian Genocide to suburban New Jersey 1982. Based in part on real diaries, the book explores how one family builds hope and resilience from the roots of trauma.
“This book has been a very long time coming. I began working on it over ten years ago while teaching full time and caring for my two kids. I snuck in my research and writing when I could find time here and there. I actually wrote a good bit of this book while commuting from my home in Queens to my job in the Bronx. When time was really tight, I maintained a goal of writing one sentence per day. Eventually, I finished the book and found a publisher who wanted to help me put it into the world. So, I’m very excited to share First Rule of Fire with interested readers,” Gopoian said.
Gopoian said an impetus in her writing was her family history. Her mother was raised Orthodox Jewish and married her Armenian father, causing a major upheaval in the family. “My mother’s parents didn’t attend the wedding and didn’t speak to her for years afterward. As a kid, I was fascinated by this dramatic turn of events, and I wondered what it meant about me that I was the product of this union that was also a painful rupture,” she said.
Gopoian added, “I was aware that my grandparents on both sides had been through horrible things, but they didn’t talk about it, and it never occurred to me to ask. Occasionally, a little piece of information would seep out, one horrific detail that I couldn’t stop thinking about or make sense of. My grandparents’ experiences were so far away from my reality. After all, I was living a relatively safe and privileged life as a middle class white kid in suburban New Jersey. First Rule of Fire was born out of this dissonant experience: trying to make sense of my family’s painful history from a vantage point of relative comfort.”
The structure of the book helps to convey that dissonance. There are three interwoven narratives:
