Before the movie was the printed word.  

Jhumpa Lahiri‘s first novel, The Namesake, followed her Pulitzer Prize award-winning book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies.   Houghton Mifflin has a nifty collection of resources related to Jhumpa and The Namesake, here.

The author did  a round of interviews in New York last week in the lead-up to  the movie’s release.   Along with five other reporters, we met with her for about half an hour.   She speaks in a very measured and deliberate manner.

On this snowy day, she wore a short brown blazer, an  orange silk scarf around her neck, and a brown & beige check plaid wool skirt with a thread of the same burnt orange running through it.

This is my  kickoff to Namesake week,  Jhumpa Lahiri’s interview about  her book  and Mira Nair’s adaptation of it:

Q: Was the book based on your family?

JL:   It is based on a more diffuse experience.   The characters were cobbled together from people I’ve known, people I’ve been exposed to.   I think I was just drawing on the experiences of growing up in this country, being of Bengali heritage, as a sort of background noise for the story.

I always thought of it as a very basic coming-of-age tale, of growing up and feeling divided loyalties and to me that was my main goal, to get that across, that sense of what is it like to grow up with a name that doesn’t make sense to you, doesn’t make sense in the place where you’re living, it comes out of those feelings.

Q: There’s a line in the book about how books help you travel without moving an inch.   Does, in your mind, Ashoke Ganguli regret that he had traveled, regret the journey?

JL: No, no.   I think there’s always regret because leaving one’s home is a great sacrifice, even if you want to, even if there’s something that comes from the departure, but I think that also, there’s a line later in the book where he tells Gogol – and in the movie too – “Every day since then has been a gift.”   Because I feel that, for Ashoke’s character, leaving India was very much a way of being reborn after the trauma of almost losing his life in the accident.   So for him to leave India and to strike out and make it happen again is what was the motivation, to step away from that place in his life.   People leave home for all sorts of different reasons and that’s just one.  

Q: Did you find when you were growing up that among your classmates at school there were other children whose parents had emigrated from other countries and had similar experiences to your own?

JL: I imagine there were.   I grew up in a university town in Rhode Island, and it was a very parochial community back then especially.   Still is, but moreso then.   All of the Unites States was, there was just less diversity out there.  

There were kids from various backgrounds.   In its own way it was a kind of international little community, as most universities tend to be.   And I did not have the experience of growing up in a town where I was in the only Indian family, there were kids from other parts of the world, but the weird thing is we never talked about it.  

The weird thing was there was never any sense of”¦what I felt was the need to just deny that we were different in any way, that our names were different, that we looked different, that our parents ate different stuff.   We’re just not gonna talk about that stuff because we really, really, really just want to be accepted by the people who are surrounding us and that was the sense I felt.  

And it was a pity, but I think there was something about the way this country was back then, it was just not interested in people coming from a different part of the world, it was not interested in India, there was no consciousness of India.   India was like another planet back then.   It was a handful of stereotypes and that was it.  

I think this country has changed a lot, people have changed, and Indians have a whole generation that has been born and raised here, and that’s made all the difference.   But when I was growing up in the early seventies, that generation was just, just arriving and just landing and really didn’t exist.   It was just this very strange kind of experience of having so little to feel connected to, even with each other.  

I think with my parents’ generation there was more of a sense of solidarity.   So with my parents friends it was more like “Ok, I’m an immigrant, you’re an immigrant, let’s have dinner on Saturday and be connected” but I think for the kids, it was harder because we were always, I was always – I won’t speak for anyone else – felt divided and I always felt a kind of anxiety of being different, but also feeling that it was an inescapable part of who I was, so I think that there were other kids.   There were Indian kids, Chinese kids, Vietnamese kids, but especially immigrants from Asia at that time, and Latin America.   There   were people who would very proudly say “Oh my grandfather is German, or French, or English, or Italian, because these were immigrant groups that were in the consciousness of Americans, and you could read a history book that said “This is when the Irish came, and this is when the Italians came, and this is when the Germans came, and this is when the English came.”     But you know, there wasn’t a chapter on the Indians.  

The kids going to school now will have a chapter on “”¦in the late sixties a law was passed allowing people from many other parts of the world to enter the country ..” and they’ll feel that “O.k., this is what happened and this is why were all here.”   But when I was growing up, we weren’t in any books, there was no affirmation, no acknowledgement of the journey my parents had made, not just my parents individually, but no acknowledgement of the journey Asians, Indians, people from the other parts of the world were making.   I think it’s different now.  

But it’s taken a generation to go through that cycle and get things established, it’s just normal.   I’m sure for those first generations of Germans, and Irish, and Italians it was equally destabilizing because they had no sense of “Who are we?   Why have we come?”

Now there are museums of immigration and you can go to Ellis Island and understand this is what happened.     It’s very different.

Q: When did you see the completed film?   Was there any anxiety to see it for the first time?

JL: I saw it for the first time privately in November 2005.   I didn’t feel anxiety in the making of the film.   I felt relaxed and curious.   I was burning with curiosity as we were going to see the movie.   I had no idea what to expect.   I had seen shots and stills so I had a sense.   But to see it, I was just overwhelmed and had a very emotional reaction.   I didn’t cry when I watched it.   I cried afterward.   It was the totality of the movie.  

One of the great gifts that Mira has given to me is, you know, when I write something, I give it everything that I can, but at the same time, I’m very removed from it, and when it’s done, it ceases to matter to me.   I’ve never gone back to something I’ve written and been affected by it because by that point it’s so completely out of my system.   I’m not going to go to my own writing to have those experiences, I’m going to go to others’ writing for those experiences.  

So for the first time I was able to experience something I had written and have any reaction to it.   It was the first time I saw something and it was her movie and it was different. but it was essentially something that I’d written that had percolated in me for years and years and had taken a long time to write and all that stuff and the characters and it was true enough to my book, and I saw it and I was moved.  

I was moved by the story that she had told.   It was very powerful viewing, but the main thing that moved me was her devotion, the love she put into making this movie and the fact that she had read something that I had written so intimately and so carefully and internalized it to that degree that she was able to make something come out of it.   I felt that as an artist, I always work alone, I feel very alone, that’s just the way it is for writers, it’s a very solitary life, but I felt this connection to Mira because she had taken something and really understood it, and taken it in and put it back out.   It was really extraordinary to feel that connection to her, even though I wrote the book and she made the movie, but somewhere in there, I feel this lifelong bond with her because of what’s happened, because of that transaction from one to the next.   And that was really powerful, I was deeply moved, I just wept in her arms because of that.  

Q: What made you decide to put the extramarital affair in the book?

JL:   They’re not conscious decisions.   You’re just in it, you’re in the story, you’re working with these characters, you’re living with them, you’re thinking about them and they do this stuff, you know?   And it just felt that, well, here is a character, a woman who’s deeply confused, conflicted, going into this marriage for the wrong reasons, it’s going to backfire, that’s all.   Once I was in her world, I just thought “There’s no way she’s going to stick by his side.”   There’s something she’s still thrashing out in her life and I just felt that was what was logical for the story.   I wasn’t thinking “Oh I’m going to write about an extramarital affair.”   It wasn’t something imposed from without.   To me it felt organic to the book I was trying to write and that’s why, if you know your characters well enough, if you try to get to know them, the things they do should seem inevitable.   So that was my hope, that her actions were perhaps upsetting, perhaps wrong, but also inevitable, that she would betray Gogol and she would not be true to him.   It’s just a part of life.

When I write something I don’t think about how people are going to react to it.   I can’t because I know I’m going to disappoint someone, no matter what I do.   The world is full of all types and there’s always going to be one person, more than one person, who’s going to hate what you do, and think it’s a piece of trash, and attack you, and think it’s all wrong.   And if I stopped to think about that, I wouldn’t write, so I don’t think about it.
 
Q:   What do you think of the new book jacket with the bright orange color?

JL:   I like this.   I think for a movie jacket it’s tastefully done.   Personally I thought that this cover was pretty [the first one] but it didn’t say anything about my book.   At least for Interpreter there was some spirit to it.   There have been some jackets in other parts of the world that I think are more interesting.

Q: What do you expect people who have not read the book to take from the movie?  

JL:   I imagine there are a lot of people who are seeing this who will not have read my book, that’s totally normal.   Movies reach a mass audience that books don’t.   I don’t know.   It’s impossible for me to say what they’re gonna get out of it.  

When I saw the movie I felt about when I was completely removed from the book, as much as a person can be from something they worked on for years and years, I think it’s a very strong film, very pure, visually very strong, I think it tells its tale, it’s affecting, the performances are very strong and people will get out of it what they want and need.  

I think it gives a glimpse of the experience of what it’s like to be caught between two worlds and two places, to raise a family in a place that you aren’t sure is home and that you don’t fully trust, and just what comes out of that experience.   I hope it tells that story in a fresh and unique way.   It’s certainly not a story that’s never been told before.   It’s a basic human experience, but I think Mira has told it in a strong, memorable, affecting way, and I hope that that will come across when people see it.

Q: Obviously South Asians will see their families’ experiences in your book.   Did you get a reaction from people of other backgrounds too, did other people write to you because “˜That’s what my family went through also when they came here’?

JL:   Very much so.   Obviously, South Asians read my books, for the obvious reasons.  

So many other people of so many different backgrounds have said as much to me.   It’s not even that they come from an immigrant background.   Maybe it’s like, I get letter from people who’ll say “My Dad was a diplomat, I grew up all over the world and I never felt that I had a home and we moved from place to place and I read your book and I felt that I understood these characters were up against.”  

And I certainly hear from the French, the Italian, Palestinian, Jordanian, every possible immigrant background they’ve connected to something in the book, there’s something basic in this story about what you gain and what you loose.   It’s a journey and it’s a tale of gains and losses.   What’s left behind and what’s acquired and the tension between that.  

And the specifics are the specifics.   My story is a Bengali family that grew up in New England.   Every day there’s a new family coming here and getting off the plane at JFK and figuring things out and America is extraordinary that way.  

It’s the only place in the world where you have that richness of that influx, that constant influx, and it goes back to the roots of the country and it’s pressing forward and it’s never really stood still.  

Even if you go back to the literature of 100 or 200 years ago, Willa Cather, she was writing about families on a prairie from Eastern Europe who are settling there and it’s not home to them.   Hawthorne was writing about immigrants from Europe and the tension of what it’s like to live in the new world.   And I think that that’s what America is and that’s what makes it a unique place in all the world and it’s extraordinarily rich country in that sense.   And I hope people will be able to connect to that.  

Q: Will you be traveling to India for the premiere?

JL: No, I just came back from India on a personal visit.

Editor’s note: Tomorrow on Namesake week, an interview with Kal Penn.