Photo credit: Dustin Pearson

By Natslia Holtzmsn

Hour, Detroit

In his debut novel that ’Esquire’ named one of the best books of 2025, a local Armenian American author grapples with questions of authenticity, identity, and who gets to tell a story.

“I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to write a piece of historical fiction,” says Aram Mrjoian, a creative writing lecturer at the University of Michigan and the author of a critically acclaimed book published last summer.

Waterline, Mrjoian’s debut novel, centers on an Armenian American family based in Grosse Ile. The story is largely set in 2018, but the early-20th-century Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire casts a deep shadow over both the Kurkjian family and the novel as a whole.

“I didn’t want to engage in recreating the trauma of the genocide,” Mrjoian says, “but I did want to think about how it influences [an] Armenian American family living today.”

The novel follows a multigenerational family whose patriarch, Gregor, survived one of the few successful sites of resistance to the genocide at Musa Dagh. More than a century later, one of Gregor’s great-granddaughters swims out into Lake Michigan — much farther than she can possibly swim back from. Her death prompts her parents, aunt and uncle, and cousins to reflect not only on their family history but on their wider cultural history — and, more pointedly, on how each of them has been shaped by those histories and Gregor’s storytelling.

Mrjoian grew up in an Armenian American family in southeast Michigan. Though he says the book is not autobiographical, he worried, especially early in his writing career, that drawing on his background might be considered a “manipulation” of sorts — a way of “trying to get readers to feel a certain way about something that maybe I’m taking advantage of.”

He says he struggled with the question, “Am I really the right person to be talking about this? Or am I Armenian enough?”

Mrjoian grew up immersed in “certain parts” of Armenian culture but doesn’t speak the language or attend the church. “It’s my name,” he says, “and it’s some of the food I eat and certainly my cultural touchstones.”

As he earned his MFA and PhD, Mrjoian immersed himself in the work of other Armenian American writers; in the end, he tried to write from his own “very specific point of view,” one that is often “on the edge or the fringe of that community.”

Since the book was published last June, Mrjoian says he’s received a few emails from “people in the Armenian community [who] have been like, ‘The Armenians in this book don’t look like my community — I can’t believe they’re drinking; I can’t believe there’s adultery.’”

Growing up, though, “that’s the experience I had,” Mrjoian says.

He wanted to write “a story about Armenians that wasn’t just that [the genocide], that was not just this reminder of what happened to us more than 100 years ago. Honestly,” Mrjoian adds, “it was hard at times because there is commercial pressure to [provide historical context].”

At a time when most readers can easily search for historical information on their own time, he was struck by the following question: “What does it mean to be obligated to explain a historical atrocity?”

Ultimately, Mrjoian decided that he was neither obligated nor compelled to do anything but tell the story he’d set out to tell — and that’s what he did in Waterline.