My Experience Meeting Jhumpa Lahiri: Writer of The Namesake
by Sotheang Khieu
The Namesake is a novel about the struggles of an Indian immigrant family adjusting to life in America. The story’s main character, Gogol, has to deal with the problem of connecting his Indian world and his American world. Gogol’s challenge is a universal one. The novel is essentially about his search for his identity. Which develops as he learns to balance his two worlds. The universality of Gogol’s conflict attracts audiences of different age groups, gender, and race. The novel became a hit and was on the New York Times Bestsellers list, and Lahiri also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. The Namesake is her second major work and first novel. It was adapted into film in 2007 by the talented Indian director, Mira Nair. Western Connecticut State University had the pleasure of hosting a public meeting with Jhumpa Lahiri in November of 2008 and a private meeting for WCSU students. I had the fortune of attending both meetings but before I get to that it is imperative to know why meeting Jhumpa Lahiri was so important to me.
What Gogol went through is representative of the immigrant experience. It is something that millions of immigrants have gone through, including myself. My family came to America in the early 1980s as refugees of war. Despite our reasons for coming, the experience is very similar to other immigrant families. Like Gogol, one of the many difficult things I had to go through was related to my name. My first name is Sotheang. I remember when teachers would call roll in elementary school and, as soon as they got to my name, there was always a pause. I automatically knew it was me. I didn’t get taunted as much as Gogol did but I remember wishing that I had a Western name instead of one that is so strikingly different from everyone else. Now I love my name. It is part of my identity and I’ve learned to embrace it. Growing up in America as an immigrant is difficult because as I tried to develop my identity, I had to decide how much of me is Cambodian and how much of me is American. Dating for example is not part of my culture. Most of the time marriages are arranged. I am not opposed to the idea, but this is my American side speaking, I would rather date and see what I’m getting myself into before I marry anyone. As I grew up I had to pick and chose how much of me will be influenced by my heritage and how much of me will be American. I struggle just like Gogol struggles and only with time and experience did I learn to appreciate being Cambodian and being American. For some time now, there has been no literary representation of this type of immigrant American experience until The Namesake. This is why this story is so important to me. The story of Gogol and his family’s journey in America is a story that hits home not only to me, but to millions of families across America who have gone through what the Ganguli’s have gone through.
I didn’t quite know what to expect going into the meeting with Jhumpa, since this was my first time meeting an author other than my professors. Like most people, I connected the main character, Gogol, to Lahiri- assuming that the two would somehow be similar beyond the obvious characteristics that they both share. I was hoping to discover how much of Gogol is in Lahiri, because I am a huge fan of the novel. So, as fans do, I placed Lahiri on a pedestal of greatness along with all the other authors that I admire and entered the meeting with all this in mind.
I found the private student meeting to be more interesting than the public one because here, students were able to ask questions according to their interest, which consisted mostly of questions about the craft of writing itself. The meeting was more personal and more informative than the public one. I had the pleasure of starting things off by asking Lahiri how much of Gogol is fact that was inspired by her own experiences and how much of his character was fiction? To paraphrase Lahiri’s reply, she said that Gogol was actually based on a little boy she met in India. She found the name interesting because it wasn’t an Indian name. It was in fact a Russian name. She scribbled the name in a notebook and years later it inspired her to create a novel surrounding the boy’s name, which I found to be very interesting-that something that may seem meaningless at the moment later transforms into something huge.
As for my earlier assumption that Gogol is mostly inspired by Lahiri’s experiences, that assumption turned out to be only slightly true. She didn’t get to this part of my question in this session, but answered it when an audience member from the public meeting asked a similar question. I loved the analogy she used. She said that the curves or the frame is like her but the rest is fiction. Her reply was simple and to the point. Jhumpa Lahiri and Gogol do have many similarities: they are children of foreigners, they both experienced the conflict that arises from coming from one culture and living in another, and they both are college-educated. But like Lahiri said, only the frame work is similar. Gogol experiments with marijuana, he undergoes a divorce, and for a large part of the novel, Gogol could not understand his parents. Lahiri’s own experiences are slightly different from Gogol’s. In the public meeting with her, an audience member asked if she advocated same race marriages or not, since Gogol married an Indian woman and later divorced her. Lahiri simply replied that she has no bias either way. Gogol’s divorce was simply part of his journey.
Judging from the questions that were asked in the public meeting, I wasn’t the only one who had such assumptions about the author and the protagonist being one and the same. This was an important discovery for me because I have a tendency to associate modern fiction writers with the characters in their work. I don’t find myself doing this with Homer, Shakespeare, or Hardy, but with The Namesake I did. Defusing such assumptions gives more credit to Jhumpa Lahiri as a writer. This doesn’t change my reaction to the novel but it does change my level of appreciation towards it. I love The Namesake because I see bits of myself in it. I have a deeper admiration for it now because I know that it was skillfully crafted out of a name in a notebook, and with some personal cultural elements added, it blossomed into a panoramic journey about a family and a boy named Gogol.
This was a very enlightening experience for me because I got to see the artist and the craft that went into the art. I feel that audiences in the public meeting missed out on this experience. The audience was too focused on drawing connections between the artist and the art. In the private student meeting, we were fortunate enough to have a chance to pick at Jhumpa Lahiri’s brain, politely, about the process. There were other interesting things that she talked about in the private meeting concerning how she creates her work. I remember Jhumpa Lahiri said she has a room with a desk in it, set aside specifically for her writing. She also said that she would write a certain number of pages a day, five days a week and not do any writing on the weekends. Lahiri stuck to this five day regiment when she wrote her second novel, Unaccustomed Earth. When she is not writing, Lahiri said that she continuously reads fiction to keep her mind in that imaginative mode; a lovely thought since writing and reading do go hand in hand. She has no crazy tricks or weird rituals to speak of. It seems that writing is just what she does, five days out of the week, and it just happens to turn out well. She makes a task that may be daunting to some seem simple. The experience left me enlightened. I was pleased to find out that, although I may not easily do what she does, what went into the art of creating her novel was just a mixture of a few ingredients. A frame, an unusual name, and time, were added together to produce a novel that is loved by many.
Aside from being pleasantly clear and straight forward when answering our questions, she truly seemed humble and unaffected by her success. It turns out the pedestal that I placed her on was nowhere to be found. Jhumpa Lahiri presented herself as a person, just like you or me, who just happens to be a writer.
