Jhumpa Lahiri, the author whose works we will be reading this week, did not find the road easy to getting her works published. She, like many of the other authors whose works we have read so far, represented a minority in her childhood home of Kingston, Rhode Island; her parents were Bengali immigrants who moved from London to the United States when Lahiri was three.
Having grown up an avid reader and writer, her own cultural identity crisis led her to all but abandon writing through much of her teen years until her late twenties. This was ultimately borne out of what she described as the following: “For much of my life, I wanted to be other people; here was the central dilemma, the reason, I believe, for my creative stasis.” (The New Yorker)
When she finally did get back into creatively writing, she did so with a tentative and audacious purpose; not to reach out to her peers, but to reach out to her parents and those who saw her as simply an “American child”. Slowly she began to reconcile her experiences and her childhood in the form of creative writing. Feeling misunderstood and rejected by her parents and those around her in America, her interests and dreams questioned at every turn; these struggles became the foundations for the many short stories she would begin to write.
Now that she had begun creatively writing again, the wish to have her works seen by others slowly grew. She began sending her short stories – sometimes individually, sometimes grouped together – to publisher after publisher, with rejection her only response. Publishers complained of her stories being difficult to connect to, disjointed, and irrelevant. Essentially, they felt that her stories would not hold any interest for their readers.
This was understandably dispiriting, despite what she described as the occasional pleasantries sent back from publishers still unwilling to give her a chance. As described by her, this process of submitting stories and receiving nothing but rejection letters in return went on “for years.” (PIF Magazine) Eventually though, she got her chance with a publisher and her somewhat meteoric rise to the top began.
Since then, she has had myriad success and recognition for her works, even winning the coveted Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her work “Interpreter of Maladies”. Despite this, however, she still struggled with her own sense of belonging. Her parents never truly recognized her work, she never felt fully American, and many of her works received heavy criticism in India.
For these reasons and others, she found her way to Italy where she lives today. She has expressed feeling the same comfort in Italy that her mother used to upon their regular trips back to Kolkata. And so it is that she has reinvented herself as an author producing works in Italian, still contemplating identity as always she has.
References:
Julia Leyda, An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Volume 5, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 66–83, https://doi.org/10.1093/cwwrit/vpq006
Lahiri, J. (2011, June 6). Growing Up as a Writer. Retrieved October 23, 2020, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/trading-stories
Aguiar, A. (1999, August). ‘Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri’ interviewed by Arun Aguiar. Retrieved October 23, 2020, from https://www.pifmagazine.com/1999/08/interview-with-jhumpa-lahiri/