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
For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.
Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.
You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I've realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn't feel a part of any tradition. I think that would have been too overwhelming, in a sense.
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.
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.
I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.
That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing
Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.
It is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.
Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.