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
...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.
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.
One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.
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.
For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married.
Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.
Ive 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.
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.
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 seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.
I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.