Aram Mrjoian didn’t want to write a history lesson. He wanted to write about a family.
That distinction drives everything in “Waterline,” his debut novel published last June, which centers on an Armenian American family living on Grosse Ile. The book is set mostly in 2018, though the shadow of the early-20th-century Armenian genocide falls across nearly every page. A young woman swims out into Lake Michigan farther than she can swim back. Her death pulls her parents, aunt and uncle, and cousins into a reckoning with family history, cultural memory, and what gets passed down through generations whether anyone asks for it or not.
“I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to write a piece of historical fiction,” Mrjoian told Hour Detroit.
Mrjoian teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan and grew up in an Armenian American family in southeast Michigan. The Kurkjian family at the center of “Waterline” isn’t autobiographical, he says, but it draws on something real. The family patriarch, Gregor, survived the resistance at Musa Dagh, one of the few sites where Armenians successfully fought back against Ottoman forces. More than a century later, his great-granddaughter’s death forces the surviving family members to sit with that inheritance and figure out what it means to them now, in suburban Michigan, in 2018.
Writing from the fringe
Mrjoian wrestled early and often with whether he was the right person to tell this story. “Am I really the right person to be talking about this? Or am I Armenian enough?” He grew up immersed in certain parts of Armenian culture but doesn’t speak the language or attend the church. “It’s my name,” he said, “and it’s some of the food I eat and certainly my cultural touchstones.”
Not a unique feeling, frankly. A lot of second and third generation Americans carry that same low-grade uncertainty about whether their claim to a heritage is legitimate. As Mrjoian worked through his MFA and PhD, he read deeply in Armenian American literature and eventually landed on writing from what he calls his own “very specific point of view,” one that sits on the edge of the community rather than at its center.
Some Armenian readers have pushed back. Since the book came out, he’s gotten emails from people saying the Armenians in “Waterline” don’t look like their communities. “I can’t believe they’re drinking; I can’t believe there’s adultery,” he recounted. His response is straightforward: that’s the experience he had growing up. The book doesn’t pretend otherwise.
The weight of explanation
There’s a question at the heart of “Waterline” that Mrjoian kept returning to while writing it: what does it mean to be obligated to explain a historical atrocity? Readers can look things up. The Armenian Genocide is documented, studied, and argued over in academic and political circles. Mrjoian didn’t want to spend his novel recapping events that readers can find on their own.
“I didn’t want to engage in recreating the trauma of the genocide,” he said, “but I did want to think about how it influences an Armenian American family living today.”
Still, he acknowledges there’s commercial pressure to provide that context. Publishers and readers sometimes expect diaspora writers to do the work of explanation alongside the work of storytelling. Mrjoian pushed against that. He wanted to write “a story about Armenians that wasn’t just that, that was not just this reminder of what happened to us more than 100 years ago.”
That pressure isn’t unique to Armenian writers. It shows up across diaspora literature, the expectation that a novel must also function as an introduction for uninformed readers. The approach Mrjoian took instead is to trust his characters and trust readers to follow them without a guided tour.
A Detroit-area story
Grosse Ile matters here. Not as backdrop dressing, but as a specific place with specific geography, a river island community at the southern edge of Wayne County that sits far removed from the rhythms of the city proper. Lake Michigan as destination, as endpoint. The water in the title earns its meaning.
As Hour Detroit covered in its profile of Mrjoian, the novel draws a direct line from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Great Lakes, from Musa Dagh to Grosse Ile, across generations and oceans and the specific loneliness of an assimilated family still shaped by something it barely speaks aloud.
“Waterline” is out now. Mrjoian is based in Ann Arbor.
