Today I am thrilled to share an interview with award-winning novelist, Shanthi Sekaran! Shanthi has written two contemporary fiction books, and her most recent novel Lucky Boy has received numerous accolades, including being named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. Lucky Boy has struck a chord with readers as it weaves together the story of two very different immigrants and the boy who connects them. We had a great time chatting at Denver’s BookBar, but since there was a bit of background noise, I’m including the transcript of our conversation rather than the audio recording. Enjoy!
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Chelsea Pennington: Will you describe your publishing journey? How you first got into writing, all the way to having your books published.
Shanthi Sekaran: So I guess I started writing really at the end of college and then pretty quickly applied to MFA programs and went to Johns Hopkins. This is back in 2001, so that was sort of my start in writing. Out of that program I wrote a novel, and that novel has never been published. I think I was just sort of learning how to write a novel at that point. And then my first book that came out was The Prayer Room. That was in 2008, so that was a good seven years after I did my MFA. And that was with a smaller independent press called MacAdam/Cage. So my experience there was pretty different from what I’ve had with Lucky Boy. Lucky Boy is my latest, and that came out in 2017, January with Putnam. That’s been a much different publishing experience and a great experience as well.
CP: In between the MFA program and The Prayer Room coming out, were you working on The Prayer Room that whole time, or did you have other projects?
SS: Pretty much. I was finishing this novel that never got published, and teaching English in Germany, and then moving to England and working temp jobs that I hated. I think working these jobs I really didn’t like gave me the motivation to actually sink my teeth into The Prayer Room and start doing something I really wanted to do. I started that in England, and that must have been three, four years after I graduated. So, you know, I didn’t publish a lot of short stories. I had one short story come out in Best New American Voices. That was my first publication, right out of grad school. But I haven’t done the traditional track of lots of short stories and lots of writing conferences. I was kind of just on my own, working on my novel.
CP: So looking at Lucky Boy, if you’ll summarize that a little bit and then talk about what made you want to look at these different types of immigration stories?
SS: Lucky Boy is about a woman named Soli, and she’s from Mexico. She’s undocumented, and we follow her from leaving her little village in Mexico to arriving in Berkeley, California. She ends up having a baby in Berkeley. The other side of that story is the story of this woman named Kavya, and she’s Indian-American, has lived in Berkeley for a long time, has had a pretty privileged life compared to Soli, and is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
The book, for me, started off more as an examination of Soli’s story. It was her story that first really intrigued me. And it started from hearing about parents in the U.S. who were losing their children to the foster system or to adoption when they were put in detention centers. So that’s where my curiosity started. And then I knew I wanted to tell both sides of that story, because I wanted to understand what was happening for someone like Soli, but I also wanted to understand what was happening for adoptive parents, and how they got to a place where they were willing to adopt a child whose parent wasn’t necessarily willing to give them up, and I really wanted to explore both sides of that story. But it was really Soli that I started out with, and then Kavya that I had to kind of learn about, in terms of character and motivation I had to really figure out who she was.
CP: You are first generation Indian-American–
SS: Yeah! I was born in the U.S.–I don’t know if that’s first generation, I guess it’s first generation? I don’t know what it is [laughs]
CP: [laughs] The articles I was reading for research said first generation, so I think that’s right! But, your parents are immigrants to the U.S., but you were born in California, right?
SS: Yeah, in California.
CP: So that aligns a little more with Kavya’s experience of being Indian-American, so it’s interesting to me that you say she’s sort of the one you had to figure out a little more in terms of bringing her character to life?
SS: Yeah, you know, I guess what I had to figure out with her was how important it was that she was Indian, that she was the daughter of immigrants. I kind of made her Indian to start off with because I make most of my characters Indian, because why not? But then I had to realize that it was actually very important that she was Indian-American because my story was not just the story of Soli. It was the story of how different immigrants function differently on American soil according to the privileges they’re given.
CP: You have an interesting part in the book where you talk about Kavya seeing the name of an immigrant owner of a business and how they’re proudly displaying it, and how that was so unusual–there’s the line about how if there’s an American flag sticker on the window, it’s probably owned by an immigrant.
SS: I remember with my own parents–they had an office, so they didn’t have the window display, really, but I remember them putting an American flag sticker on their car after 9/11. And, you know, I was like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I sort of had a problem with the flag-waving reaction to that incident. But I was like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and they’re like, ‘Well, we don’t want our windows smashed in.’ For them it was self-defense.
CP: Either in your MFA program or in publishing, have people pushed back against having main characters that are not white?
SS: Not about them being not white, not really. I expected more pushback maybe from the Latinx community, but haven’t really received very much at all. The Latino community’s been very welcoming of this book, which I feel very grateful for. The pushback that I most recently got was about the fact that I gave equal weight to both sides of the story. There was someone—I think it was on Twitter—someone had a real problem with the fact that I gave equal weight to Kavya’s story, you know, with Kavya being a woman who wanted to take away the child of a struggling immigrant mother. And so we went back and forth on Twitter a little bit, but essentially, she had a problem with me doing something that it was very important for me to do. I wanted to give equal weight to both sides, and humanize both sides and fully explore both sides, because in the real-life scenarios, the people adopting children away from detained immigrants, those are real people. They’re humans, you know, they’re nuanced. They’re not comic book bad guys, they’re real people.
CP: How did the story change and develop as you were researching and then writing it? Is the way that the story is published how you had it in mind when you first came up with the idea?
SS: No, not at all, it changed a lot. I worked on it for about five and a half years or six years. I began with one draft that took about two years to write, and then I spent three years fixing that. So the ending changed. The ending completely flipped from one outcome to another, after a few drafts. I lost a character, I added a new character–Vikram Sen, the CFO at the Silicon Valley company. He’s a pretty late addition, the whole Silicon Valley element was a late addition. It changed shape, and chronologically it changed as well. It went from being very linear to actually being a little more…jumbled up, chronologically.
CP: And did those changes mainly come from just from you looking at it and reworking it, or other opinions and editors suggesting stuff?
SS: The ending change came from me showing the book to a few friends, and them calling attention to the fact that the ending I used to have didn’t really do justice to the dramatic build-up that I created. And then I came up with the crazy ending that I came up with. I had a couple readers, my agent, a couple readers early on who were like, ‘I don’t know if this is interesting. I’m not sure if it has the dramatic tension that it needs.’ So then I decided, okay, well let’s look at how we can shuffle this around chronologically and maybe create an inherent tension, an inherent curiosity, by not telling everything as it happens.
CP: What advice do you have for readers trying to write a character where they don’t really share much experience?
SS: Yeah, you know, first you have to take some time and actually ask yourself if you’re willing to put in the work. I really had to sit down with myself and be like, ‘Can I write this?’ and ‘Should I write this?’ because I knew it was going to be a load of research. And I also asked myself, ‘What am I going to bring to this story that someone else couldn’t?’ How am I going to make this my story, in a way? And so I had all these questions sitting with me, and for one thing, I was willing to face down the research, to actually do it. I was willing to take a very long, slow process with creating Soli’s character. And with creating Kavya’s character, because Kavya’s this woman who’s struggling to have children, you know, and that’s not something I’ve had to deal with. So even though I’m Indian-American and so is she, there are a lot of things in her life that I hadn’t had to experience. So I committed to just very carefully and slowly building Soli’s character and making sure she was fully fleshed out and not a saint, and as nuanced as I could make her. And then I think creating a duality where, you know, I brought in the Indian-American thread, and I was actually trying to shed new light on the privileges that we afford different types of immigrants. How someone like Kavya’s family, or my family, were given a pretty secure path to being documented, to becoming citizens, as opposed to someone like Soli who lives in a sort of peril, with uncertainty, who can’t set down the foundations that my parents were able to.
CP: You mentioned the book was published in 2017, and I think it was right before Donald Trump was inaugurated.
SS: Yes
CP: I’m curious if you’ve seen a change in reaction in these about two years since it’s come out, and then if you think it would have been different at all if you were planning and writing the book in the two years?
SS: I don’t know if I could have written this book in the last two years. I think I’m too stressed out by what’s happening in the country to sit down and write a book like this. When you write fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, you really need some mental quiet, and when I started this, you know, from 2011 to 2016, I had that mental quiet that I needed, I had that space, so I was able to really develop the characters, develop the stories, take my time.
In terms of what’s happened in the last two years, the book…it keeps bouncing off the real world in new ways. With the migrants who are now approaching our border…So the conversation is constantly changing. A few months ago we were all talking about family separations at the border, and my book becomes relevant to me in new ways, like, every two weeks. It’s a constant development. So when I give book talks and stuff, I’m constantly rehashing what I want to say and reconsidering how my book applies to reality.
CP: I’m curious how people react when you go to book talks. When people are asking questions–I guess if they’re coming to the book talk hopefully they’re excited about the book–but do you ever get people who are a little bit…antagonistic seems too harsh, but questioning why you would tell these stories?
SS: Not questioning why I would tell these stories, but I do get people probing for me to making generalizations that I’m not comfortable making. You know, I had a man at a reading ask, ‘Well, what’s the difference between Indian immigrants and Mexican immigrants?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, what is the difference? There is no difference.’ Indian immigrants want their children to be educated and get jobs and have families. The Mexican immigrants I know what their children to be educated and get jobs and have families. I mean, it’s all pretty standard. And I think that people look for these distinguishing differences between groups of immigrants, inherent differences, and I don’t think there are inherent differences. They’re all people trying to make their lives better for different reasons.
Probably the most sort of honest pushback I got at an event was with some high school students in Arkansas. Basically, they were like, ‘Well, what do you think this country should do about illegal immigrants?’ They said illegal immigrants, but undocumented immigrants? That was really the most direct question I’d gotten from anyone. I knew what they were getting at–because their teachers afterward were like, ‘They were being really polite.’ [laughs] So I kind of knew where they were coming from, and I answered their question honestly. I spoke specifically to what I thought needed to happen, with the caveat that I’m a novelist, you know, I can’t give the sort of complex answer that policy person would, but I do my best.
CP: This book covers really big topics, really relevant topics. How did you balance writing about those subjects and still making it a story that’s not too preachy and is still interesting as a story and not a non-fiction lecture?
SS: I knew that there was always a danger that this issue could get resolved. I mean, obviously it hasn’t, but I knew as I was writing it, it could stop being current fiction and could become sort of a comment on something that happened years ago. So I had to really focus on making this a story that would outlast the issues, that would just be a very compelling human story. So I really focused on character. I focused, not on the issues, but on the very deep impulses we have as humans, like the impulse towards motherhood or parenthood. The impulse toward change. So I focused on story in that way so it would stay current.
CP: You got your agent a week before your first child was born, and then you were finishing Lucky Boy sort of in the wee hours after your second child was born. Obviously motherhood is an important topic in Lucky Boy, but I’m curious how that has maybe affected your writing both in Lucky Boy and in the rest of your works?
SS: Right, so, I got my first book deal a couple weeks before my first child was born. So I think that my career as a writer has had to grow alongside my children. They’ve always been intertwined. Being a mother and a writer…you don’t get a lot of hours. So you learn to take the hours that you have. You know, my writing day has to stop either at 3pm or earlier, or maybe, you know, on longer school days at 5pm. And I really only get a few hours in there, and plus I teach, so my writing time is very concentrated over a few hours, maybe a couple days a week. The upside of that is that when I think about it, I think about when I will ‘get’ to write. It’s never ‘have’ to write. I never see it as a burden. I see it as this thing that I get to do. I work well, I think, with having that full schedule and having that tension of wanting to get back to my writing, and I wouldn’t be the writer that I am without my kids. I think I experience the world in a much more intense way because of my children, and I notice the world in a much more minute way because of them, because of the things that they see and the questions that they ask.
CP: Do you have any tips for people who have these busy schedules, and how you get into your writing mood or routine?
SS: You know, I’ve tried various tactics over the years. I went through a phase where I would type out a poem–someone else’s poem–that I liked. Just to get me in the groove of writing, so there wasn’t so much pressure put on, you know, the first words I was going to come up with. I’ve tried that, and I’m working on a children’s novel right now, but the poetry stuff works great for my adult fiction. Sometimes I just have to start. I start with one sentence, you know, and I think it was Hemingway’s advice to always leave yourself a little bit that you haven’t written yet, just to have a thread to pick up the next time, so I try to do that. Sometimes I just have to start, and sometimes I know the writing isn’t going to feel good, but it might actually be good writing. It just doesn’t feel good that day. Sometimes there’s chocolate. Chocolate actually really helps.
CP: True of everything in life. [laughs]
SS: Yeah! [laughs] And it’s going to be slow some days. I know that. And some days it’s just going to go like gangbusters. And what can I do, you know? I just have to go with what comes.
CP: You mentioned this, but you were born in California and you’ve lived in Germany and England and now you’re back in California. How has living abroad and traveling impacted your writing?
SS: I learned a lot. I guess I was technically an immigrant in England–I was there for six years. I learned a lot about what it’s like to first arrive in a country. To want to just have a normal life, for things to just feel normal and a little boring. To get into that routine where you feel safe and secure and confident in what you’re doing. Living specifically in England, you know, one of the first jobs I had was working in a call center at Capitol One, which is like the worst job for me. It was not the job that I should have been doing, to be strapped to a phone and forced to answer calls all day. But the thing that it taught me–it took me from sort of not knowing the nuances of British English to being able to pick out different accents to learning turns-of-phrase, to learning very British idioms, learning how things were phrased differently there than they were in the U.S. It was like a boot camp in British dialogue, and that helped me a lot with my first book, with The Prayer Room. So, you know, one of the great things about being a writer is that you take your experiences, good or bad, and you take what you can from them. Every experience offers something that will enhance your writing.
CP: What’s one thing you wish you’d known, either before you got your MFA or before you were published, something you would tell new writers hoping to get published?
SS: I wished I’d had more of an idea of all the great opportunities out there for all the people who weren’t doing an MFA. Because, you know, my MFA was actually only a year, and I had just barely dipped my toe in the water, and then it was over. I didn’t really know very about conferences, like Sewanee and Bread Loaf, and these great things that are just so enriching for early writers. I wish I’d known more about that.
CP: What’s your favorite writing resource, whether that’s a book or blog or whatever?
SS: I really like The Millions and Electric Lit. They’re both websites. There’s one called Writer Land that I think is great. It’s got some good stuff on there, and good writer interviews as well. In terms of craft books, I really like Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird. It’s a great insight into the writing life, and some good craft stuff as well. I’ve been reading The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio [and Dorianne Lux] and it’s a poetry craft book, but it gives me a lot of insight into writing prose as well.
CP: If you could choose any character you’ve written, published or not published, to go on a road trip with, who would it be?
SS: Any character that I’ve written to go on a road trip with…I think I would go on a road trip with Vikram Sen, from Lucky Boy. Because he’s kind of wacky, I think it would be unpredictable. He has a lot of money so we’d stay in nice places. Yeah, I think he’d be fun.
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If you want to learn more about Shanthi and her books, visit her website here.
Click to buy The Prayer Room and Lucky Boy.
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