Fazlur Rahman: Dedicate Yourself to the Writing Process
In this interview, author and doctor Fazlur Rahman shares what inspired his memoir, the winding road it followed to get published, and more.
Fazlur Rahman, M.D. was born and brought up in what is now Bangladesh. After his medical education in Dhaka, New York, and Houston, he practiced cancer medicine for 35 years in San Angelo, Texas. He is an adjunct professor of biology (medical humanities and ethics) at Angelo State University, a senior trustee of Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and an advisory council member of the Charles E. Cheever Jr. Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.
His articles, essays, and stories have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian Weekly, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, Harvard Review, Short Story International, Dallas Morning News, and Houston Chronicle. He is the author of the book, Our Connected Lives: Caring for Cancer Patients in Rural Texas.
In this interview, Fazlur shares what inspired his memoir, the winding road it followed to get published, and much more.
Name: Fazlur Rahman
Book title: The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Release date: May 12, 2026
Genre/category: Memoir
Previous titles: Our Connected Lives: Caring for Cancer Patients in Rural Texas
Elevator pitch for the book: Spanning continents and decades, Fazlur Rahman’s story is astonishing. In The Temple Road, he takes his readers from his childhood in the lush, remote village of Pora Bari, Bangladesh, to the bustling city of Dhaka, where he attended medical college, to rural West Texas, where he cared for hundreds of cancer patients over the course of his 35-year career. A passionate advocate for medical humanities, Fazlur calls for greater empathy in medical care—and reminds us of the humanity of the immigrant experience.
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What prompted you to write this book?
I was born and raised in a Mullah family—an old-line Muslim clan—in a remote village in what is now Bangladesh, with its hardships and heartaches, its myths and superstitions. The people, places, and cultures that I was a part of have almost entirely disappeared. At the age of seven, I lost my mother, the heart of my family. But even at my tender age, before she died, she imprinted on my impressionable mind her wish for me: “Someday you will be a doctor, Fazlur, and help people.” She had seen enough suffering and death in her short life without having access to any doctors.
As my ill luck would have it, to compound my anguish, soon after she was gone, a parasitic illness called kala-azar almost extinguished my own life. Looking back at my tenuous beginning and where I am today, I felt compelled to preserve my past and my mother’s memory, and that’s how The Temple Road: A Doctor’s Journey came to be. I also hoped that this engaging story of love, joy, suffering, and achievement would inspire others.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
It’s a long story and I could write a book about it. I had lost track of some of the happenings and timelines. I can give a brief sketch here, a cautionary tale.
I began the memoir many years ago and wrote a 130,000-word manuscript, forgetting that I wasn’t a Stephen King. My aim was to keep the past alive to understand the present. A well-known Manhattan agent was interested in it and asked me to shorten it, but I did not follow through: I was busy with my cancer patients and the medical, ethical, social, and personal issues that affected them and me. I wrote about all this for various publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian Weekly, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, and Oncologist, among many others.
Over the years, I inserted fragments of my life into some of my columns, articles, essays, and stories, including two short stories in the then Short Story International and a number of academic articles for medical publications like Leukemia Research. Along the way, parts of what would become The Temple Road were published in Harvard Review and later selected as “Notable Essays” of the year. At about the same time, The Lancet published two parts of my story, including a picture of my village of Pora Bari and myself as a pre-med student. While doing all these things and practicing cancer medicine, my wife, Jahanara (Ara), and I were raising four children. (Ara has been an anchor in my life.) I was also working on a nonfiction book of stories about my cancer patients and my work as their oncologist, which was later published as Our Connected Lives: Caring for Cancer Patients in Rural Texas (Texas Tech University Press, 2024).
It was only when I retired from cancer practice in 2011 that I put sustained concentration on the memoir and whittled it down to about 80,000 words. My astute friend Jerald Winakur, memoirist, essayist, and poet, loved the manuscript. He edited it and helped it get accepted by a university press—but that contract fell through.
In 2013, I was accepted by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference after I submitted the title chapter of The Temple Road. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, was my instructor. She liked my book very much and suggested I focus on my own experiences and feelings and not of those many peripheral characters, even if they are interesting; memoir is a matter of selection, not meant to be all-encompassing. Her advice turned out to be incredibly fruitful.
After that, a Manhattan agent sold it to editor Renuka Chatterjee at Speaking Tiger Publishing in India. The Temple Road was published in 2016, with widespread positive reviews from the Indian publications. The publisher invited me (and Ara) to present the book at the India International Center in Delhi and at the huge Times of India book festival in Mumbai. We received good reception in both venues. Renuka Chatterjee consistently believed that the book deserved a wider audience in the U.S. However, my agent couldn’t sell it here, and soon her agency merged into a bigger one, and I was in limbo. I moved onto the other projects.
Then, Travis Snyder, my editor in chief at the Texas Tech University Press, also saw value in The Temple Road and is publishing it in May 2026 as a companion volume to Our Connected Lives.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
At first it was my faulty thinking that thwarted me: that having a good story of 130,000 words would be attractive to the editors. That wasn’t so, of course, and it was a hard lesson I needed, this being the first book I wrote. Only after deletions, additions, and reflections did it get published. While looking for a publisher, I had to accept the truth of the book business: Editors reject you for a thousand and one reasons. Some are valid, and some subjective, for the same books or writings that have been rejected by many editors are eagerly accepted by other editors.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Learning by associations during the writing process: One memory led to another, which either I didn’t think of or I had initially forgotten. Sometimes this also led me to thinking where I had been or how I had spent my life, as in Annie Dillard’s dictum: “How we spend our days, is of course, is how we spend our lives.” I couldn't say that I had faithfully followed that dictum.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
My “Temple Road” is both literal and metaphorical. I walked this path daily from my village to my school in Benapole town. The path passed by a Hare Krishna Temple and zigzagged through jungles, which, among other things, were infested with dangerous shark-tusked wild boars and cobras. Then I had my metaphorical Temple Road: from my village to Dhaka, the megalopolis, for medical education; and from Dhaka to New York to begin my American life 57 years ago. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t take this road. Each of us has our own Temple Road to travel, and I hope the book will shed a little light on their path. Love, joy, suffering, and achievement are a universal human story.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
You may be a genius and your brain is teeming with ideas, but you still have to put those ideas on paper. Dedicate yourself to the writing process through life’s adversities and absurdities, which will surely intervene at one time or another—sometimes without warning—if you really believe in your work.
