Celebrating One Of The Finest Writers Of Our Time, Jhumpa Lahiri

Celebrating One Of The Finest Writers Of Our Time, Jhumpa Lahiri
on Oct 09, 2019

When Jhumpa Lahiri's book Unaccustomed Earth went straight to the top of the New York Times fiction list 11 years ago, the US literary establishment started to regard Jhumpa Lahiri as the bestseller author who changed the future of American novels and how they would be written from then on. To most, this wasn't surprising considering how Jhumpa Lahiri was already a celebrated writer across the world but this changed things for the gifted storyteller. Lahiri's new book, both the NYT and TIME magazine had said, represented a fundamental shift in direction of the American novel. No longer could American fiction fit the direction of white, American-born men; the new direction of American writing was now informed by the experience of the immigrant. And America was lucky that it housed an immigrant writer like Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri was born in London to parents who emigrated from India. She grew up in Rhode Island and then attended Barnard College. After graduating, she moved on to Boston University, where she earned three master's degrees in English, creative writing, and comparative studies in literature and the art, followed by a doctoral degree in Renaissance studies. She married in 2001, and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children. For years after university, she avoided coming to New York, fearing that she'd be intimated by the literary scene and wouldn't write. It was after a considerable number of years that Jhumpa took to writing. And thank god she took to writing. Readers were quick to embrace her stories because they reflected the immigrant experience without any kind of discrimination or bias. She provided a brilliant insider's account - that was sharp, precise and heartbreaking. Her first book, the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. It was followed in 2003 by The Namesake, which was made into a film by the Indian director Mira Nair. Married to a Greek-American journalist, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, with whom she has two children, Lahiri is admired for her elegance and her discipline. The Guardian reported how Lahiri doesn't read her reviews and her Pulitzer remains wrapped up. When she writes she likes to pretend that she never won the prize at all and that her life is as simple as it was before her writing was swept up in acclaim. I have to will my world, my life, back to that place, because that's where I find the freedom to write, she told The Guardian. If I stop to think about fans, or bestselling, or not bestselling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day. In 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri did something drastic. She conducted a geographic experiment of her own. She moved her entire family to Italy. Where she immersed herself in Italian language and literature. And the result? A gorgeous memoir by Jhumpa Lahiri aptly titled In Other Words.

“What does it mean,” she wonders, “to give up a palace to live practically on the street, in a shelter so fragile?” Why abandon the English language that made her famous and move with her family to Rome, as though she's a teenager, who board a flight and is completely okay arriving in a world where she knows no one? Because she was in love: