In Which All Our Heroes Are Just Men...
A few weeks ago, I had a moment with Jhumpa Lahiri. She’d come to my city to read from her new book, Roman Stories, and of course I was going to be there. I want to say that my incentives were logical, that Charlottesville, where I currently live, is an unlikely spot for celebrity literary guests, that the timing was convenient since finally, I could hang out with my colleagues, and even more obvious, that I am a writer, and it’s kind of a thing we do as writers—go for book events and whatnot. But my real motive was also a little weird—Lahiri helped me write my first novel.
Minutes before the reading, I strolled to one of our cities’ major bookshops with my colleague, K, also somewhat of a Lahiri geek. Our tickets for the reading included a copy each of the book but it did not stop us from walking directly to the section of the store where Lahiri’s works were displayed. We stood there, touching, and cooing and gawking at the Lahiri stand. Then it happened. I felt the air around me stiffen, an indication that there was another presence in close proximity. K., and I turned around, almost at the same time, and there she was, Jhumpa Lahiri with her kohl lined eyes and black turtleneck. There was eye contact, she and I, and there was an open mouth, my own of course. She walked past and did not stop moving, though she gave a tight-lipped smile. There seemed to me, even then, something hard about her eyes, though it was not a hardness of malice, but of distance, the veneer of a person who did not want to be there.
I’ve been speaking to colleagues and new acquaintances about my novel coming out in Spring 2025. This recent sharing has been less about the book and more a lament of my predicament, a way to explain why I always have my head in my computer, why I haven’t shown up to the mixers. I share some of the exciting timelines surrounding my edits, or about a friend in a similar boat who has received options for book covers, except my listeners are not fiction writers, and few of them fancy themselves scholars of a certain rigor, invested in serious research. There is almost a self depreciating humor in my insistence to talk book publishing details among friends who may otherwise not be interested. This brings me to the thesis of this month’s letter, the sense of liminal identity that comes with having two fledgling careers, both of them precarious, jealous, and demanding, each in a genre so fundamentally different that they might as well be opposed to each other.
Jhumpa Lahiri who stopped writing in English, and instead now writes in her adopted Italian and translates into English, has been speaking recently on what I think of as liminal identity—a sense of alienation born out of life produced from multiple margins. In this particular book talk, she answers questions about her childhood, learning English as the language of assimilation, learning the Bengali of her parents but feeling (and I paraphrase) the limits of not being as culturally immersed as her family. Italian, she says, is powerful to her because it is the language of her choosing, though to Italians, she too, is an outsider. She also talks about the light in Rome being better than the light elsewhere which I, before reading the book, thought to sound a bit woo-woo.
I want to say that this sense of alienation that Lahiri speaks of is very familiar to me, especially as I grapple with my current predicament working in two disciplinary registers. But I must admit that whatever Lahiri says will resonate with me, because well, I can hardly think of myself as a fiction writer without thinking of Lahiri. I remember writing my novel in 2021 while reading old Lahiri books like a person working to their favorite playlist. Her influence in my work has not been as stylistic as one might expect—our characters are preoccupied with vastly different questions and ways of being in the world, but I will say this: the texture of a story, its unique hums and rhythms, the details that go into the task of filling out a scene, I learned from Lahiri. There are two other writers who have come just as close – Taiye Selasi, whose novel was my central permission to embrace fiction, and Elena Ferrante.
At the end of the Lahiri reading, we get on a long line to have our copies signed, and some of us obsess about taking pictures, except we are not allowed. Lahiri flatly refuses to take any picture with the hundreds of people who filled the theatre. Even though she signs our books, her sense of remove is quite apparent so that days after, one of my professors, an established thinker in her own right would lament this distance. Many of us who attend agree on this one thing: Jhumpa Lahiri, a dear and beloved writer, is not a warm person.
When a reader engages with a text—perhaps a novel, or non-fiction, something is produced, an affinity, a kinship. The ideas leave the boundaries of the author’s imagination and become an object that readers hold under the light; we ask our favorite books, as we do all art, to speak to our lives, our hunger, to cater to our intrinsic human desire for connection. But what about when the reader comes in contact with the author? Is another object produced, where the author loses a right to subjective personhood and becomes this image of sociality and rhetoric. As I think of my assessment of Lahiri and I wonder if the author, Lahiri, and writers in general, have to become objects much like their works are objects. I offer this reasoning mostly because I am afraid.
In the last couple of years. I have felt an intense need to disappear. It’s a feeling akin to the Lina character in Elene Ferrante’ novel, My Beautiful Friend. Some days I wake up in a start, sweating in the cold, my heart ramming while I think: people know me, sometimes it is a simple nagging desire to erase my social presence, so that I shuttle between extreme online engagement and zero engagement. I think about my novel, and I wonder about it too, about the questions it invites. And of course, more practically, where does the public end and where do I begin?
These are questions that have preoccupied me, and have offered me both further questions and insights about myself, and the ways I am learning to re-encounter the world. I will share the concluding part of this rumination in the next installment of this letter, that is, around this time next month. In the meantime, please feel free to pass it along if you think it might interest someone.