Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiriis an Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladieswon the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake, was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nicknameJhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Her book The Lowland, published in 2013, was a nominee for the Man...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 July 1967
CountryUnited States of America
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.
Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people's lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.
If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.
I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.
When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.
It's hard for me to talk about anything I'm doing at the moment. It's only after I finish something that I can actually describe it in words.
At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention.
There's obviously a message, or a moral, or something. I think that's good - but it's not something I actively think about, to be honest with you.
The narrator is not anybody in particular. It's a group of women, so there's no particular identity to the narrative voice. A Faulkner story, 'A Rose For Emily.' I admired used that voice and I wanted to try it out.. It was an experiment for myself.
As he watched, he had an immovable expression on his face, composed but alert, as if someone were giving him directions to an unknown destination.
Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.
He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.