Activism & Discipline: An Interview With Kiran Desai

by William Toms

In October, I sat down with the author Kiran Desai at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writing Program to talk about craft, class, and the role of artists in movements for social justice. Desai is the author of two novels. Her first, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was released in 1998 and won the Betty Trask Award for emerging Commonwealth writers. In 2006, Desai published The Inheritance of Loss, which would go on to win the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. On the day of our interview, bright and windy, Desai had just arrived from a meeting of artists, organizers, and expatriates concerned with the rise of right wing nationalism in India and around the world.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: In reclaiming the right to tell stories about where you’re from, you’re kind of acting as an instrument of justice as a writer. In your opinion, when young writers are getting started with their work, does it help or does it hurt to have that knowledge of your work as a historical corrective in mind? Should you be thinking about the politics of your writing as you do it, or does that produce flat art?

KIRAN DESAI: There’s a John Berger line that is like a line of gospel and it goes like this, “Never again shall a single story be told as if it is the only one.” He was a very politically active writer, of course, and this was a call for an inclusion of voices that have not historically been represented in literature.

Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium is a book of essays on the qualities he thought necessary for fiction in the new millennium.  They are Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, and Visibility. The last one, unwritten—he died before he finished—was to be Consistency, and was likely meant to stress the underlying unity to an abundance of narratives.

These ideas have been important to me in my work. I think that it is valuable to be conscious of your role in the wider world and to think of the people affected by the work you produce. Look at your work from outside-in, not only from inside-out. Don’t just think of your own little world.

WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: Why not?

KIRAN DESAI: Take September Eleventh. The American literary world was really caught off guard, because the work of fiction, along with a lot of other work by other entities, had not been done. American involvement in the Middle East has been huge, always. American foreign policy affects the lives of people all over the world, and the American literary establishment had largely been writing books about themselves, for themselves. And then there was this stunning thing: What? Why do they hate us? I had always been envious of a publishing world so large and comfortable that writers from that world did not have to wonder how they were seen by anyone outside their world. These were writers who didn’t have to look at themselves from outside-in, who were not self-conscious, but then I understood this luxury was also a constraint. It’s a disaster to live entirely within your world.

Had writers been doing the work they should have been doing we all would have been more prepared. It was really surprising to see John Updike suddenly trying to write Terrorist, and trying to understand what had happened.  I admire him, but it was too late and somehow all wrong.

Working like this is not easy or comfortable. When you have the unfair privilege of representation, because of the language you speak, or the class you come from, or where you have traveled to, in vain can you proclaim your freedom from what those who have been represented by you think of how you have represented them.  Especially when this representation is seen as crucial because of the historical lack of representation of that community on the world literary stage. One is forced to grapple with one’s own limitations and blind-spots. It is a learning experience that feels painful, yet necessary.

After saying all this, I do think it’s also so important to be able to vanish into a work of fiction.  A Chekhov story, those small human moments, seem so close and vivid still, perhaps because they are not weighted by the politics of the time. So you have to be able to do two things. The way I personally do this is by working extremely hard to create the discipline and the habit, the time and the space to write, so that it becomes so enormous and so large I can retreat into it and work out things slowly, in a more nuanced way.

I take a very long time to write, over ten years to produce a book and I’m not saying everyone should take that amount of time. However, I do feel that you have to create that writerly space for yourself, and you do it by extreme discipline and by transforming a certain part of your life into a writing life. So minute by minute, how much time are you spending on your book? How much time are you spending transferring your real life into an artistic life, instead of living your real life? Are you living your life on the page? Transform as much of your life as you can into that world of your writing, so that space becomes as big or bigger than everything else.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: Week to week, what does that disciplined writing life look like for you? What did you have to learn to go from lacking that, to having a kind of mechanical or disciplined routine? 

KIRAN DESAI: By now I’ve been working this way for decades. Writing has been my major activity, and while we were talking earlier about political movements and my feeling the need to become more involved, most of my life is writing life. I had to fight hard to acquire the habit, and then eventually I could wake up in the morning and go straight to my desk without thinking about it. My life took on the rhythm of quiet. 

WASHINGTON SQUARE: You write in the mornings?

KIRAN DESAI: And then I write in the evenings. I have very little life in my life. I have books in my life. It’s very hard to recommend this to a young writer because I don’t know how much of a sacrifice a young writer is willing to make. 

WASHINGTON SQUARE: Let’s presume it’s infinite. 

KIRAN DESAI: Let’s presume its infinite. I work in the morning, I take a short break in the afternoon, and I usually work in the evening as well. I may take a night or two off, here and there, but mostly I work both times. So I have been over-successful, I would say, in transferring my life into my writing. Real life is less vivid to me than the world of my work. The sacrifice, though, is huge. Most writers have families, and they have kids, and they have a teaching life, and they have a vacation life. I don’t. I have writing. Writing is my life. So it’s been great for my work and probably not so good for my life.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: It’s reassuring to hear that tradeoff, that sacrifice talked about in such stark terms. 

KIRAN DESAI: Whenever I have to make the decision—whether to go out, or stay home and work—I find that, despite myself, I mostly make the decision to work. I sometimes feel fear when I see what I’ve created of my life.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: Really?

KIRAN DESAI: Yes, because it’s a ghost life in so many ways. But at the same time, virtually every single time I have had to make the decision, I have made the decision for my work. So I am the one to blame, and it is, I have to say, wonderful for one’s work happiness, to live within one’s art.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: We were talking earlier about the political situation in India, and I think a lot of writers from marginalized communities, whether that’s defined as working class or queer and trans writers, writers of color, writers from the global south, we all have this unifying phenomenon of being tied together by the grief of leaving a home, to then write about it. But, I know that personally, I’ve experienced a lot of tension in whether I should be writing about a place or for it. Writing and reading is still in a lot of ways coded as a very white, western, upper-middle-class activity. Have you ever felt that tension, of who you’re writing for?

KIRAN DESAI: I was very conscious of knowing that I had grown up with a particular kind of novel because of course I grew up in India, and so we grew up reading a lot of British literature, Jane Austen, for example, and I always thought of the novel when I was growing up as a creature that is very cozy in the living room.

So yes, I associated a novel with a certain class and a certain level of comfort.  I was very conscious of trying to transform that in the way in which I wrote. There were some books that helped, like Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men. These were books that left the living room and followed the journeys of moving people. There are writers interested in the subject of migration and movement, who began to think of the novel differently. How to get the novel to move when it just wants to settle down at a fancy dinner party and gossip.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you do it? Mechanically, how do you do it?

KIRAN DESAI: I took that Berger line to heart, and I wrote multiple stories so my last book grew out of multiple immigrant stories.  Then it became a book of having to decide how many stories it could contain and I had to cut endlessly. When you’re writing a book of movement you have so many scenes involved, so many landscapes involved, so many characters, you don’t stay in one home through time, through different seasons, so you’re dealing with such a scattered myriad scene.  Eventually I constructed the book by recognizing echoes and parallels, I drew lines between first world and third world, between colonial times and days of globalization, between stories of migrants from various developing nations — and that is how the book is constructed.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: So you wrote multiple parallel stories, and then used whatever linkages.

KIRAN DESAI: Yes. There’s no real plot; there’s migration stories.  Part of the book is set in New York City, another part in the Indian Himalayas.  In both settings, people from many different places and classes. The underlying questions are similar. They are questions of migrant labor.  Who has claim upon the landscape? Who gets to be rich and powerful, who has to be poor? Do some lose so others can win? How long do you stay in a place until you belong? How long before your language is recognized? How long before you have political representation?

If you read something like Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives, which is also a book of multiple migration stories, it’s fascinating to see how it’s constructed. You would never in a million years think a writer could pull that off.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: How so?

KIRAN DESAI: It’s about the scattering of a community of unknown poets during a military dictatorship, so it’s made up of endless stories of vanished poets, and you think you’d go crazy reading it, but in fact it has real power, the multitude of such stories of people who are unknown. It has real power. Of course it’s such a difficult thing for a novelist to do, because each time it has to be fresh and the reader has to be able to take that multitude, accept it.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you think he carried the linkages through? What’s the propulsive quality?

KIRAN DESAI: The details are absolutely precise, so you are interested in every character and every person, in every scene. It moves swiftly, it moves at a clip between different classes and different nations, there are multiple viewpoints, but there is an underlying unity to all these stories. In the end there is a theme of vanishing, of movement, and anonymity, of the uselessness of a flag for people like this.  It’s very pertinent to today.

When you’re talking of home and you’re torn between writing about it or writing for it, I feel like for people like us it’s inevitable that when we write about home we are also writing about losing home. You know, that in the very idea of home, is the notion of the loss of home, the inevitability of the loss.  That we are writing to convey sense of place while simultaneously undoing sense of place to make the point that there are many claims upon that landscape, there are contradictory points of view.

I’m often asked who I write for. I feel like I write for the characters in my book, because I cannot wonder whether I am writing for people in India, or whether I am writing for people here in the States—will it make sense to this audience or that audience. I can read a character in a Tanizaki novel about a man and his cat, his first wife, his second wife and his mother, and I know Tanizaki was not writing with me in mind.  He was trying to get the cat, Lily, exactly right. I find that I really just write for the book to function. I don’t think of the audience—that feels narcissistic or rude or nasty, but I don’t think it's possible in today's world to think of a particular audience.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: To step back to isolation for a moment, one of the potential fears, the drawbacks of doing a lot of this work in isolation is, you can start repeating really, really, really bad writing habits without anybody to check you. However on the other hand, the workshopping model of writing a piece, bringing it in for criticism, revising and then moving on may have the effect of flattening the work. You said in 2006 that when you write on your own you can write the extremes. Do you feel like isolation is a way of accessing those extremes? Or do you think that can be done if your work is regularly seen, and you’re regularly taking part in the world?

KIRAN DESAI: I’ve found that, you know, writing workshops are very good for some things and isolation is good for other things, and just like with being conscious of your work in the wider scheme, while worrying about the creative part of it at the same time, you have to be able to do all things. Which is the hard thing to say to a young writer, but it's the truth.  A writing workshop is certainly useful. It teaches you how to read, how to critique, gives you encouragement, helps you to hone your craft, it, yes, highlights problems straight away —but it is also not so good for other things. It is often good for the craft of writing, but not always so very good for the art of writing. If you are constantly aware of what people are thinking of your work, you don’t vanish into your work.  In a classroom you might desire audience approval, so you may not go to the darker, more serious, more difficult writing, and you may write to be cheered by a group. So in a way, at the extreme, you can make your work closer to advertising and undo all the strangeness so everyone understands exactly what everything is about, and that’s what you have at the end—something that can be understood by everyone, the language ironed out. 

WASHINGTON SQUARE: It has a profound deflating effect.

KIRAN DESAI: Yes. At the same time I am a product of writing workshops, but after that I retreated to a very old fashioned way of working. Now I work in extreme isolation, and absolutely it's true you can vanish for years, and you are forced to do some very difficult work afterwards if you have been self-indulgent or have gone down a wrong path. Then you have to apply yourself to the tremendously hard task of revising, but still, you have those strange pieces and those odd bits. You have the darkness and you have work that is likely to be very strongly in your own voice. 

So learn from the writing workshop, but then maybe retreat for a stretch. You’ll learn the balance that works best for yourself.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: This series was originally framed as providing craft advice for the working class and otherwise marginalized writers who don’t have access to the blunt instrumentations of a workshop, where they show you how to do this stuff, so I have three questions. First, what’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever gotten and had to leave behind? 

KIRAN DESAI: The worst writing advice is to write what you know. I find that it’s so valuable to try and write what you don’t know as well as what you know. To only write what you know, I don’t think that’s very interesting. I think we fiction writers have to trust in the imagination. I had to write scenes of immigrant voices and I was not familiar with all those communities. I had to do my best. It meant listening very carefully to stories. You know Nabokov when he wrote Lolita famously sat on the back of school buses to hear how young girls speak, so yes, listening very hard and trusting in the imagination, really, it’s essential to put yourself in uncomfortable places.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: What’s the best writing advice that sits in your head and draws you back?

KIRAN DESAI: The best writing advice is, I think, the writing advice that I gave to all of you in class: how to take criticism. Some criticism is immediately appealing and you grab it at eagerly because you see how it will save your work. Then there is criticism that is not immediately palatable, that you have to sit with a little before you perhaps try out some of the suggestions you’ve been given to see if it does actually change your work for the better. And then the third kind of criticism is criticism you need to reject. This is the most crucial point. Learn to stand up for your own work because nobody else will do so. You have to be able to fight back, and you have to be able to turn away criticism that is not going to be good for your work, because there will be that criticism. There will be editors or teachers who will give you advice that will be harmful to your work, because they have a totally different idea of what your writing should be.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you know what that is? Because, coming from a community that does not read and write a lot of fiction, my impulse is to take everything that everyone says as the divinely inspired word of God.

KIRAN DESAI: Don’t do it, Will. Don’t do it! How do you know? You will know with time. You will know once you have changed your work using this criticism, returned to it six months later. It’s often so much to do with time, reading your work, waiting, rereading your work, waiting.  You are dealing with a publishing world that isn’t always very broad-minded. Readers are much more broad minded and willing to take on different stories, the publishing world is close to the market. For example I’ll tell you one bit of advice I was given on my last book which was divided between the States and India—and England, too, in fact. The advice I was given was to absolutely cut out the United States altogether and have a book that was only set in India, and then I thought, no! This goes against the heart of what I’m trying to do. If I’m trying to draw parallels, and I’m trying to talk about migration in India, across shifting borders, and I want to have a parallel shifting, borderless territory in the basement kitchens of New York, then I can’t just cut out half the story. If the entire concept of your work is being attacked, then you will know. Other times you will know by doing, and learning to trust your own writerly voice, because publishers and editors do not always know the quality of what they’re getting. They are thinking of the book market and we are not.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you get any quiet writing done in this city?

KIRAN DESAI: You cannot get distracted, you have to be like a monk and build up discipline. It’s a religious practice, or a spiritual practice. So practice it like a spiritual path, and a physical one, too, in that you have to build your stamina. A novel takes sustained, patient effort.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you write at home?

KIRAN DESAI: I write at home. I’ve never been a cafe writer. I can’t go to an office space.

Once you start doing the difficult work of creating discipline and patience, Will, a decade on you’ll be okay. You won’t ever have to worry about being able to write or not, but only about what you’re writing.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: Easy peasy, nine and a half years and things’ll really start to-

KIRAN DESAI: After ten years it really won’t be a question anymore, it’ll be perfectly fine.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: Well that’s, that’s reassuring.

KIRAN DESAI: Well it takes that.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: Is there anything you’re working on now?

KIRAN DESAI: I’ve been working on a book forever. See, if I was in a writing workshop, quite likely I’d be finished. But instead I’ve taken a long time to explore a multitude of stories and now I will whittle it down and whittle it down and distill it. I’m working on a book called The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny and it’s a book about global loneliness, the division between nations, the division between classes, the division between races, the fact that the past is vanishing so fast—many kinds of loneliness, not just romantic, but the novel seen through the lens of an endlessly unresolved romance.