Sally Hayden’s This Is Also a Love Story sent me back to American Mother, Diane Foley and Colum McCann’s account of grief, faith, fury and the difficult business of looking directly at the person who helped murder your son

American Mother came out in February 2024 and I remember being surprised that it didn’t make more of a splash. (I’m a bookseller, so a good book slipping past is a personal insult.) It has moral complexity and real political substance and a very human difficulty at its centre, and it seemed to me exactly what a Chapters reader would go for.

Two and a half years on it feels more urgent. Wrongful detention, hostage diplomacy, the risks journalists take and the failure of governments to treat individual lives as anything more than policy problems have not gone away. Syria, meanwhile, has changed so completely that we’re now reading the book in a different political world.

What sent me back to it was Hayden’s book, which moves through war, forced migration, genocide and disaster without letting anyone be defined by the worst thing that has happened to them. She follows the relationships that carry on inside catastrophe: a couple who marry in the middle of the war in Ukraine, Rwandan genocide survivors who have built families out of one another, neighbours and strangers who decide to look after each other, sometimes at real cost.

It’s a book about love, though not the love we’ve made in the West, all pink and scented and largely concerned with restaurant bookings. Hayden is interested in love as something you do. It carries food, keeps watch and remembers names. It insists that another person’s life matters even when the machinery of war or government or history has decided otherwise.

That’s what led me back to Diane Foley. American Mother tells the story of her son James Foley, the American freelance journalist kidnapped in northern Syria in November 2012 and murdered by Islamic State in August 2014. Most of us know something about Jim’s death even if we wish we didn’t. The video was made deliberately for circulation, an execution but also propaganda, staged and edited for an audience, and the orange jumpsuit became shorthand for a horror that was both real and grotesquely theatrical.

That is the ugliest thing an image can do: make someone globally recognisable while removing almost everything that made them a person. American Mother tries to reverse the process. It gives James Foley back his life.

Jim was the eldest of five in a large Catholic family in New Hampshire, restless and idealistic and not always sure what to do with himself. He taught disadvantaged children, studied writing and eventually found his way into journalism, drawn to people living at the sharp end of events because he believed their experiences should be witnessed.

In 2011 he was captured in Libya and held for forty-four days. The South African photojournalist Anton Hammerl was killed during the capture. Jim came home with guilt and trauma and a clear idea of what detention could mean, and then he went back.

It’s one of the uncomfortable truths in the book. Diane loved her son and feared the life he had chosen, and she couldn’t choose it for him. Loving an adult child involves the gradual, occasionally hideous discovery that they belong to themselves.

There’s a photograph of Jim relaxing in a bunker on assignment in Afghanistan, a copy of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin open in his hands. A machine gunner from the 101st Airborne took it at an outpost called Pride Rock, in Kunar Province. It landed in McCann’s inbox, sent by a friend, later on the same day the video of Jim’s murder appeared online. He was stunned by the contrast between this private picture of a reader lost in a novel and the staged image going round the world. A book had made a connection between two men who never met.

McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and grew up with journalism in the house. His father, Sean, was features editor of the Evening Press and an author, and Colum studied journalism in Rathmines and was already writing for Irish newspapers as a teenager. He left for the United States in 1986 and spent two years cycling across America, listening to people whose lives had little in common with his own.

That instinct runs through his work. Let the Great World Spin, winner of the 2009 US National Book Award and the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, gradually reveals the connections between apparently separate New Yorkers. Apeirogon grew out of the real friendship between Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, who both lost daughters to the conflict and chose to campaign for peace together. McCann also co-founded Narrative 4, an organisation built on the belief that exchanging stories can create empathy between divided people. It’s an admirable idea, and American Mother tests it almost to destruction.

McCann first wrote to Diane after Jim’s death, offering to help tell Jim’s story, and she never saw the note. Years later, on a Marquette book-club call about Apeirogon, he mentioned the unanswered email and discovered that Diane was on the call. Within the hour she had written to apologise. From there he went to her home in New Hampshire and eventually to a courthouse in Virginia. The book is written largely in her voice, and he isn’t simply taking dictation: he shapes the language and rhythm of her grief and builds a literary version of her first person.

The result is often extraordinarily powerful, and it’s worth being a little uneasy about too. Who owns a story? Does literary beauty bring us closer to suffering, or does it arrange suffering into a shape we can admire? I don’t think those questions sink the book, but they’re there, and I’d rather look at them than pretend they aren’t. Diane isn’t raw material waiting for a famous male writer to give it meaning. She is its moral centre and its political force. Still, the collaboration asks you to stay alert, because what you’re hearing is Diane and McCann’s rendering of Diane, two voices in the same sentences.

At the centre of American Mother is a meeting that sounds almost impossible to contemplate. In the autumn of 2021, Diane sat across from Alexanda Kotey, a member of the Islamic State cell nicknamed “the Beatles” by their captives because of their British accents. Kotey had pleaded guilty in an American court to charges arising from the kidnapping, torture and deaths of Jim and other hostages, and would later receive a life sentence. Diane wanted to meet him, and she went in wearing a Libyan shawl Jim had given her. McCann was in the room as a family friend.

It’s easy to call this forgiveness, because forgiveness has such a satisfying shape. A grieving mother enters the room, confronts evil and comes out carrying grace, and we close the book feeling something has been repaired. Kotey doesn’t give the clean confession that narrative instinct wants. He admits punching Jim and writing the message Jim delivered before his murder, and denies being present for the killing. He says he’s sorry for the pain caused to the family, casts himself as a soldier in a war and can’t tell her where Jim is buried. At moments he seems able to recognise Diane’s suffering, and at others he retreats into the language people use when they want to admit involvement without fully inhabiting guilt.

Diane listens and questions him. She looks for the human being without pretending the human being is innocent. Her Catholic faith complicates the story, though I think we sometimes use it to make her less complicated, and I include myself in that. We flatten her into something familiar, the devout mother who suffers and prays and somehow finds forgiveness, and faith becomes the explanation that saves us from reckoning with the far more difficult person in front of us: a woman capable of mercy, fury and political action.

Catholicism had been part of Foley family life long before Jim disappeared. Diane and her husband John belonged to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary parish in Rochester, New Hampshire, and during Jim’s captivity they prayed, went to vigils and leaned on their church community. Jim drew on the same faith. A graduate of the Jesuit Marquette University, he prayed the rosary in Libya, counting the Hail Marys off on his knuckles, which took him the best part of an hour for a hundred. That was a working faith, something they used.

There is a Marian shape to Diane’s grief. She has said the Blessed Mother has sustained her, and I can’t hear that without thinking of Mary as another mother made to watch her son die. It would be easy to turn even that into a holy-card version of Diane, the sorrowful woman who endures and forgives and asks nothing for herself. Mary is more demanding than that. She stays at the foot of the cross and looks straight at what has been done, and her love doesn’t spare her the knowledge.

Diane took that same refusal to look away into the room with Kotey. Her faith let her recognise his humanity without shrinking the gravity of what he had done. He remained responsible and justice remained necessary. Her mercy and her anger come from the same conviction that every human life is sacred, and what I find remarkable is that she manages to leave both standing.

We’ve become suspicious of empathy, sometimes with reason. It’s demanded from the injured far more often than from the people who injured them, and women in particular are expected to produce compassion on command. There’s something indecent in how much we admire a woman who forgives. We turn her into a saint because sainthood is tidier than anger. Grace photographs better than rage.

Diane Foley is not tidy. She’s furious with the men who held and murdered Jim, and she’s furious with the American government, which she believes failed him and failed the family. During his captivity the Foleys struggled to get clear information or coherent support. The United States kept to its policy of not paying ransoms to terrorist organisations, and European hostages held alongside Jim were released after reported ransom payments while the American and British hostages remained.

The policy problem is real. Ransoms can finance armed organisations and encourage further kidnappings, and refusing to pay can mean accepting one person’s death in the service of a wider deterrent. But the Foleys have said they were also warned that they could face prosecution if they tried to pay a ransom themselves, which the White House disputed. Diane was expected to accept the logic of the state while her son was somewhere in Syria, hungry and frightened.

After Jim’s murder she founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation and pushed for reform in how hostage cases and families are handled. A White House review ordered in December 2014 led, in 2015, to new structures, including an FBI-led hostage recovery team and a special envoy for hostage affairs, to improve coordination and communication. Her grief and anger became politically knowledgeable. We often treat bereaved families as emotionally compelling and intellectually peripheral, the photographs at the end of the report while officials do the serious work. Diane exposes the arrogance of that distinction. Families understand systems because they’ve been forced to navigate them at the point where they fail, and that knowledge isn’t any less rigorous for having been acquired through love and fear.

And then Syria changed. When American Mother came out, Bashar al-Assad was still in power. By December 2024 a rebel offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham had swept through the country, Damascus had fallen and Assad had fled to Russia, ending more than fifty years of Assad family rule. Prisons were opened and families went looking for people who had disappeared years earlier.

Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, used to be known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. He began in al-Qaeda in Iraq, went on to lead Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, then publicly broke with al-Qaeda and later led HTS. The United States once offered a reward of up to $10 million for information about him. In January 2025 he became Syria’s transitional president.

Perhaps much of this was necessary. Syria needed hospitals and electricity and food and some prospect of a future, and diplomacy is conducted with the people who hold power, not the people we might have preferred to hold it. Neither al-Sharaa nor HTS was responsible for James Foley’s murder. Jim was killed by Islamic State, which fought both al-Qaeda and HTS. The distinction matters, and it’s a fine one given that al-Sharaa himself came up through al-Qaeda in Iraq, so the speed of his political rehabilitation raises questions I think belong inside this book.

Still, I was struck by how quickly absolute moral language becomes a regrettable complication when circumstances change. A ransom couldn’t be paid to save an American citizen because it might reward terrorism and compromise the greater good. Yet a man who once led al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, and for information on whom the United States offered a reward of up to $10 million, can have that reward withdrawn, see himself and his old movement taken off the terrorism lists and be received as a statesman when a different greater good calls for it.

There’s an important difference between Diane sitting opposite Kotey and a government sitting opposite al-Sharaa. Diane met a man who had pleaded guilty. She didn’t erase the record or make his crimes any less terrible because she recognised him as human, and her mercy sat alongside judgment. States calculate. They decide which history has to be remembered, which can be set aside for now and whose pain is an acceptable price for stability. They invoke the greater good, and sometimes they may even be right.

But “the greater good” sounds different after reading Diane Foley. It was invoked when the American government refused to negotiate for Jim, because one captive couldn’t be allowed to determine national policy. The logic is coherent. Coherence doesn’t make it moral, particularly when somebody else’s child is carrying the cost.

Diane’s position is more radical. She shows that you can meet a person without erasing what they’ve done, and refuse hatred without agreeing to forget. Her forgiveness is difficult because it remembers. Political rehabilitation is often made easier by forgetting.

Hayden has been open that her book is a kind of atonement for more than a decade in journalism, a trade that can strip the detail from people and flatten them. Reporting runs on word counts and broadcast limits and whatever is newly newsworthy, and love is rarely new. It’s repetitive and private and hard to measure, and I’d argue it may be the most important fact about how people survive catastrophe.

Both books push against the idea that tenderness is the opposite of political seriousness. Love gets written off as soft partly because so much of its labour has traditionally been done by women. Waiting, feeding, ringing round and keeping somebody’s name alive can look sentimental from a distance. Up close it’s the work that keeps people alive and stops the missing from disappearing entirely. Diane’s love became meetings, testimony, policy work and support for families she hadn’t known before. It acquired an office, a timetable and a formidable grasp of government procedure. There’s nothing soft about it.

American Mother isn’t flawless. There are moments where McCann’s prose seems to know it’s being literary, and I wanted it to sit down for a minute. The structure, bracketed by the Kotey meetings, pulls Diane and Kotey towards a moral symmetry that doesn’t exist. Both are human, but only one of them took part in the captivity and murder of the other’s child. Shared humanity isn’t shared culpability. The language of grace can also overshadow her anger. Diane’s compassion is astonishing, but her anger achieved things, and I’d hate us to admire the quality that comforts us while overlooking the one that made powerful people uncomfortable.

What the book doesn’t do is settle the questions it raises. It can’t tell governments how to respond to every hostage-taking, and it can’t tell Diane precisely what happened to Jim in the final months of his life. What it does is give us back a specific man whose death became an image. Jim was a son, brother, teacher, friend and reporter. He was brave, sometimes reckless, deeply loved and more complicated than the word “hero” allows. Diane is a nurse, campaigner, Catholic and political actor who found capacities in herself she should never have needed.

This is also a love story, though love doesn’t save Jim or convert his killer or set the moral order right again. It’s a love story because Diane refuses to let the men who murdered her son decide what his life finally meant. She won’t let the video have the last word. Violence reduces a person to a category or a bargaining chip or an image, and love insists on the full, inconvenient human being. The news tells us what happened. These books ask what happened afterwards

 

 

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