‘I hope one day we can forgive each other’: what happened when a mother confronted her son’s Isis killer
Since the execution of her son James by Isis militants in 2014, Diane Foley has campaigned for change in the way the US deals with its hostages overseas
Diane Foley. Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty
James Foley, the American journalist whose beheading on camera by Isis terrorists in Syria shocked the world a decade ago, seems to have had an affinity with Irish writers. Like Joe Biden and many other politicians, he was fond of quoting Seamus Heaney’s famous lines about hope and history rhyming. His shoulder was tattooed with some other words of wisdom from a quote from Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
It seems appropriate, then, that this heartfelt, affecting but sometimes overwrought memoir by Foley’s mother Diane has been co-written with an Irishman. Colum McCann recalls being “flabbergasted and emotionally stunned” in 2014 when he saw a photo of James reading his highly acclaimed novel Let the Great World Spin. The Dublin-born, New York-based author emailed Diane to ask if she would collaborate on a book, but for some reason the message went unseen and another six years passed before she accepted his invitation. She may have been influenced by McCann’s most recent novel Apeirogon, based on the true story of an Israeli and a Palestinian who become peace activists after both losing daughters in the conflict.
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