American Mother by Colum McCann with Diane Foley review — amazing grace

The mother of the US journalist James Foley, who was held for two years and then executed by Islamic State, tells her story with exemplary compassion and understanding

In August, 2014, Diane Foley went to church in Rochester, New Hampshire. Her son, Jim, a photojournalist, had then been a hostage of Islamic State in Syria for almost two years. It was late at night, and she was exhausted and alone. The US government, insistent that it would not pay ransoms to terrorists, would do nothing for her family; it was hellish living in fear of the sound of the telephone; the waiting and the wondering could drive a person mad. And so, here she was, clicking her rosary beads, kneeling to repeat her prayers. In that moment, all she wanted was for God to take over. She had decided to surrender her son to His plan, and by doing so, hoped to find some modicum of peace.

Even for those who believe in Him, God moves in mysterious ways. When Foley learned, only a week later, that Jim had been executed by his captors, she was devastated. Her world turned. But she was also – or so it seems to me, a non-believer –in a state of utmost preparedness. The “enormity of clarity” she experienced in church that night stayed with her through all that would follow: the press conference that was held outside her home; the brief, inadequate phone call from President Obama; the funeral that would take place in spite of the fact the Foleys had no body to bury; the arrest and trial of Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, two of the men (members of the group that was known as the IS Beatles) who had murdered her son. Above all, it would stay with her when she met Kotey in prison in 2022, an arrangement born of his plea bargain. She was (and is) full of grace, in all of that beautiful word’s senses – and it strikes me now that this was what brought the novelist Colum McCann to want to write about her. Can such a quality be adequately articulated? Can it ever be put into (non-embarrassing) words? And if so, how might those words work on an open-hearted reader?