I'm the least-experimental writer. The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that's never really interested me.
— Jhumpa Lahiri
It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitant and afraid to pursue a creative life.
I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.
I feel my writing comes from a desire to... well, it's motivated by many things, but it's inherently a contradiction in that I'm writing for myself, and it's a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect.
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.
You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take risks. It's better to do something that's not perfect and successful every time. It's important to be fearless and move forward, to learn from what went wrong.
Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write.
My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.
Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.
I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived with this all my life - this divide, this bifurcation. And in Italy, I don't feel it. There's none of that tension, only the expectation I place on myself to speak the language well. I find it relaxing. Something drops away, and I observe.
Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.
American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it.
I feel very grateful for the way I was brought up. I did not realise it then, but as I grew older and started writing and realised the material that was there was very strong, I felt very grateful that my life was complicated and that my identity was never clear but put me in a position that was always questioned.
There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.
Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.
The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.
I don't tackle major global events. I don't like to read about something - an event, a cataclysm - in fiction for the sake of reading it.
So much of my writing derives from these questions that I ask myself - things that are utterly beyond my personal set of experiences - and it's my attempt to try to... understand, to sort of break out of my own consciousness, you know, the limitations of my own life.
I feel that Italy's a country that's constantly looking out and constantly following what's happening in other cultural centers. What is being written in America, what is being published in England, what is being published in France. It's a culture that's always wanting to absorb and inform itself of other works, other writers, etc., etc.
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.
The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.
I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again.
As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.
A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling that I didn't fully belong, that my parents didn't belong.
The Italians always know that I'm not Italian.
I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.
I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
My responsibility isn't to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.
All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.
I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.
I write to feel alone.
When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.
I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing.
I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.
Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.
I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something.
When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it.
It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived.
I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York.
I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I'm writing in it now as well as reading it. It is so interesting delving further into language.
My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it's very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision.
I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
