Amanda Rizkalla on "Hungered": A Debut Novel About a Family Living in Their Car (Oprah's Book Club)

High-Level Overview

Oprah marks the 30th anniversary of her book club with her 125th selection, Hungered, the debut novel by Amanda Rizkalla. The book is narrated by 12-year-old Sofia, who lives in a car with her mother and younger brother after her mother leaves her father. Rizkalla began writing it as a college sophomore. She explains how losing her own family's housing around eighth grade became the starting point for an invented story. That story is about invisibility, hunger, mixed-race identity, and the fragile ways a family looks for safety. Three readers join the conversation. One is a young woman who lived through homelessness herself, and two are longtime teacher friends who see these issues in their classrooms.

The tone is warm, reflective, and often tender. It stays serious about how precarious unhoused families are, but it keeps returning to the humor and joy the book insists on. The conversation moves between Rizkalla's personal history, close readings of passages Oprah loves, readers' lived experiences and questions, and the craft of writing, ending on the novel's much-debated ending.

The Discussion Explores:

• How a college short story assignment grew, over eight years, into a novel
• The invisible, isolating nature of housing insecurity for a child
• How hardworking people, even a full-time nurse, can still lose their housing
• Writing hunger and food imagery that reveals a character's inner life
• Why humor and joy belong in a story about hardship
• Growing up mixed-race, language, and code-switching
• Teachers and schools as safe places for unhoused kids
• Rizkalla's writing routine, influences, and her deliberately unresolved ending

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

From a Class Assignment to a Novel

Rizkalla started Hungered at 19, as a sophomore facing a short story deadline. The advice going around at the time was to "write what you know" and to tell the stories only you can tell. So at first she used the assignment to make sense of the housing insecurity she had lived through as a teenager.

As she studied fiction more, she came to see that a story has to be more than a diary-like way of processing difficult events. Instead of recounting what happened beat for beat, she used her experience as a jumping-off point. From there she invented characters and tried to evoke what the experience felt like. She notes the book went through eight years of drafts, from a Word file and crumpled papers on her apartment floor to a finished novel on bookstore shelves.

What Happened, and Why It Felt Invisible

Rizkalla tells Oprah that her parents separated a few years after the recession, when money was tight for many people. Her mother, her brother (two years younger) and she moved away to start a new chapter, and they lost their housing. She was about 13 and in eighth grade. They had to learn to rely on each other in ways they never anticipated. Before this, she says, the family had a comfortable, stable life in a big house with a pool, which is why she stresses that "it can really happen to anyone."

She describes a central paradox she wanted to capture. The experience completely upends Sofia's life, yet it is almost entirely invisible to the people around her: her friends and teachers have no idea. That quietness makes a loud, disruptive experience feel all the more isolating. Oprah connects this to her own childhood. She grew up for years with a single mother and lived with the fragility of whether there would be enough, and at a suburban school full of rich kids she tried not to let anyone know where she came from.

One Crisis Away: The Mother as a Nurse

Asked what she wants readers to understand, Rizkalla says the experience can feel dehumanizing, like being a number or a point on a graph. Those numbers don't account for the varied reasons people end up there. She also wants readers to realize they may be closer to it than they think. You can do everything right and still be one personal or medical crisis away from being unable to support yourself.

Oprah praises the choice to make Sofia's mother, Nina, a working nurse. She pairs Hungered with Brian Goldstone's Pulitzer-winning nonfiction book, which she says shows that hardworking people doing everything the American dream asks can still end up without shelter. The two teachers later ask why Rizkalla chose that career. She explains that Nina works full time in a skilled profession, and it still isn't enough to cover rent, school supplies, or Christmas presents. The choice also highlights the financial weight of leaving an unsafe environment. Nina didn't know what would happen when she left, Rizkalla says, only that she needed to leave.

Writing Hunger Through a Child's Eyes

Oprah reads two passages. In one, Sofia sees pearly soap droplets in a library bathroom and wonders, "who could I trick?" She imagines baking them into pearls and selling them so the family could sleep in real beds. The other is the opening, where Mama says they eat with their eyes and Sofia imagines her eyelids as teeth, "each blink a bite." Rizkalla says she hadn't planned a 12-year-old narrator. She found Sofia's voice first and then worked out her age, and the voice skewed young partly because she was closer to that age herself when she began.

On the food imagery, she wanted to capture how distorting it is to experience food with the wrong sense, visually instead of through taste: "It's like asking someone to hear with their nose." She didn't want food to be decoration. Every instance of food and hunger is meant to translate Sofia's inner life. When Sofia remembers lollipops she didn't take, she imagines them as amethysts and rubies, because in that moment candy feels as precious as gemstones.

Why Joy and Humor Matter

Rizkalla insists there had to be room for friendship, self-discovery, and triumph so the book could capture the fullness of a life. When her family went through this, they still laughed at things that were funny or ridiculous. She sees humor as a source of release and relief, a way to point at something wrong or unusual and name it as such.

Natalie, a reader from Texas, echoes this. About ten years ago she lived in a car with her mother in Los Angeles, and at 12 she was house hopping. She remembers spending time in libraries and malls and showering at gyms, and she says families in this situation still keep traditions and normal routines while surviving an abnormal situation. Natalie doesn't remember hiding it as a child. It was simply the day-to-day, and she calls herself "an open book" who would rather share her story if it helps someone. Teachers sometimes got upset when she couldn't bring her flute, but school was largely "my happy place."

Mixed-Race Identity, Language, and Belonging

Natalie grew up between Hispanic and African American cultures, and she asks how Rizkalla portrayed classmates trying to "place" Sofia. Rizkalla, who is Egyptian and Mexican, recalls that people often couldn't tell where her family came from, or could only identify one side. She felt she had to keep explaining herself to be legible. She also explores language. Fluency can grant access to a community, while choppy command complicates it. She didn't grow up fluent in Spanish or Arabic and still feels self-conscious about it, and neither is Sofia fluent.

Oprah raises the scene where Nina is mistaken for a nanny at school. Rizkalla says that when your housing is in flux, other forms of belonging become more important. Prejudice in the book shows up when a vice principal asks Sofia not to speak Spanish at recess and when classmates make offhand remarks about skin color. These moments show how distant the family feels from those around them. She wanted belonging to mean social and cultural belonging as well as belonging to a place. Oprah reads a line about how "Mama puts her proper voice around parents from school." Rizkalla says she learned about code-switching by watching adults who felt like outsiders use bigger, multisyllabic words to fit in.

Teachers as a Safe Harbor

Amber and Ashley, friends of 18 years who teach at the same Massachusetts school, say the book hit home. A classroom can be a student's safe place without teachers even knowing it. School may provide a child's only hot meal or the only warm hours in winter. As mothers, they also connected with the strength it takes to leave and the guilt of putting children through hardship.

Oprah reflects that she now looks differently at cars stuffed to the brim in parking lots. She calls teachers "one of the most important forces in the universe" and thanks them for their work.

Coming Home, Craft, and Reception

Oprah reads a scene in which the family tests the shower, sink, and oven light in a new place. Rizkalla says she imagined having a home of their own so often that when it actually happened, it felt surreal. It was like a family dinner on Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, like being in a movie.

Her writing process is simple. She writes in the mornings with water or tea, and she reads a lot beforehand, because watching other writers juggle dialogue, action, and plot helps her do the same. She names Jhumpa Lahiri, Min Jin Lee, and Salvador Plascencia, whose The People of Paper is probably her favorite book at the moment. As a kid she mostly read nonfiction like National Geographic and loved marine biology. Since publication, friends have sent photos of the book in local stores, and her in-laws ordered so many copies that they arrived in a crate.

That Ending

Oprah admits that many readers, including her friend Gail, were baffled by the ending. Rizkalla says she doesn't blame them. She wanted it to be honest and realistic. She respects the characters too much to give them an easy, redemptive resolution, because "you can do everything right and still come up short." She asks readers to sit with the family in their precarity and all the anger, frustration, and anxiety that comes with it.

Conclusion

This short, heartfelt conversation shows Hungered as a novel that turns a hidden experience into something readers can feel from the inside. Rizkalla draws on her own teenage loss of housing to explore how invisible homelessness can be, how a working nurse can still fall through the cracks, and how hunger, language, and race shape a child's sense of belonging. Through all of it, laughter and small joys remain part of a full life. Readers' testimonies from Natalie and from two teachers ground the fiction in real experience and point to schools as lifelines. The intentionally unresolved ending reinforces the book's central message that doing everything right doesn't guarantee safety. For anyone curious about the novel, the episode offers moving context and a glimpse of a thoughtful new writer.

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