Frontlist | Avni Doshi: ‘I’ve never been confident of my writing..'

And then you’ve been working for years as an art curator. Yes. I moved to India soon after finishing my Masters. I don’t know why I did that. I wanted to live in India and be closer to the artists whom I was researching and writing about. I started working in the art world and writing criticism. Everyone I met encouraged me along the way, including some really smart people who were involved with Indian art. It was very kind of them. Being in India was wonderful because I got to curate a couple of shows quite early in my career. I don’t know if I would have had that opportunity in places like New York and London, where it was so saturated at that time and still is, with people who do the kind of work I was doing. Where were these shows? The first show I did was in New Delhi at a gallery called Latitude 28, and it was called The Pill. The year that I did the show, the US was celebrating 50 years of the birth control pill. It was on the cover of Time. The show was a subversive look at thinking about the science around the pill, which was being treated as this ultimate moment for feminism. I wanted to rethink that. All the artists in the show were considering the female body through that lens. There was a curatorial bind that I set in place, but it went out the window once all the artists started working. I suppose one of the things that was hard for me about curating exhibitions was the lack of control I felt. Speaking of a curatorial bind, I just love the intense sensory detail in Girl in White Cotton. I feel like your character has a high sensory threshold; she’s always smelling things and touching things. And I was wondering how hard it was to be in that character’s mind or inhabit that narrative voice for extended periods of time. Did that take a toll on you? Did you change in any way? I think it probably has taken a toll on me. I don’t know what the shape of that toll is yet. I’m probably like settling into it and living it at this moment, and it’ll become more apparent to me in various ways. I suffered from postpartum depression after giving birth to my son, but I had already completed writing the novel at that point. I just wondered if my experience of postpartum was connected to writing about it in the book: did I inhabit the character too intensely? Did the process change my neurological pathways? I don’t know what the answer is. I feel I’ve become more anxious, particularly after my second child was born a few months ago. I’m getting the physical symptoms of anxiety, tingling all over my body and other strange symptoms. To what degree is this from living in that character’s mind? Does that have anything to do with it? Or maybe the character is me to some degree. This is a question I always try to avoid. How much of the character is me and how much of me is the character? Because why should everybody assume that all I can write is me? At the same time, it’s also something for me to privately consider when I start to see things emerge in my life that have parallels in the novel. Can you give an example of such a parallel? I started writing about memory loss in the first draft of the novel, back in 2013. At first, amnesia appeared as more of an abstraction. But a couple of years later, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and I started to wonder if I had written it into reality. Life fed back into the novel in a way, because I got deep into the research of Alzheimer’s. I wanted to save my grandmother. was one of those people with no background in science who thinks they’re going to find a cure. I did a deep dive into the research and into different modalities of healing. And that research fed back into the novel. It was a strange circular process, almost spooky, how art informs life and life then informs art. Delving a little more into the characters. I know a lot of people have talked about the book in terms of motherhood. But I want to discuss the book in terms of selfhood, as in the creation of the self. The way I read it, it is more that there is a character who is pathologically self-reflexive, and yet one feels she has no sense of self. It felt like she’s trying, throughout the book, to define the contours of herself. And her mother’s memory loss is very much part of that self-erasure. So I wanted to ask, thinking of the book through the lens of selfhood, what comes up for you. Joseph Campbell says something about how all we do our entire lives is relive the drama of the nursery. That is what gives shape to the rest of our lives. I think I believe that. I don’t really believe in the endless possibilities of self-determination. We’re all pretty limited by what we’re given as children. I think that could potentially then become your life’s work, to break those patterns. For me, when I think of character building, it’s deeply important how childhood is remembered, how it evolves, and how that narrative is revisited later in life. I think we decide what we give importance to in our memories about childhoods, and in that sense, we have the power to determine certain things. But the novel’s narrator, Antara, is completely a product of her parents. There’s a tremendous amount of fear in her, in fact, when her mother begins to lose her memory because she has no relationship with her father to speak of; it’s a massive void in her life. And there is a sense that she’ll just be empty space. With no materiality left to her. Even the experience of motherhood seems disembodied for Antara. I think you’re right. People talk about motherhood when discussing the novel, but I don’t know that she’s finding herself in motherhood. Through motherhood, the holes are all the more gaping. Yes, it’s definitely not a happy ending. I’m reading a few reviews here and there, and I realise that readers want Antara’s experience of motherhood to provide a kind of redemption. I don’t know if redemption is that easy. It takes a lot of work, a lot of healing. I don’t think you pop out a baby and all the problems of your childhood are solved. Antara’s mother is such an excellent foil, she keeps her trapped in this cycle of no matter what she does, her mother will erase her – whether her mother is fully cognisant, or she is losing her mind, she’s just going to be trapped in that, you know, in that cycle of losing her sense of self. You’re 100 percent right. She can’t find a spot to land on, she can’t find anywhere to rest. Even in her mother’s madness there’s kind of a paranoia and anxiety, especially in the novel’s final scene. That scene is so deeply interior, it is as though she’s hallucinating the whole damned thing. Throughout the novel I was interested in that line between the surreal and the real; it was important for me to keep the distinction a little blurry, and that becomes more and more the case towards the end of the novel. Even though her mother is losing her mind and even though everybody around Antara agrees with her, Antara starts to imagine that everybody is involved in a conspiracy against her. And she physically begins to feel herself dissolving, as though she no longer exists in the room. There’s no place for her to be. What made you want to push it so far? I don’t know what made me want to push it so far. A friend of mine said, how hard you are on Antara! And, I didn’t think of it like that. To me this seemed like the reality of what you experience when you experience trauma. Yes, absolutely. And I wasn’t interested in redemption or in pandering to the reader in this case, or for everything to feel good at the end so we can all have a good night’s sleep. I guess a lot of people found difficult, but that didn’t occur to me as I was writing, because it was more that this ending felt truthful to the characters and the story. Well, there’s a kind of bravery in that, right, not succumbing to pressure to give the readers the sense of closure that they might crave but that isn’t there? I don’t know how much I think about readers’ expectations when I’m writing. I think about relaying necessary information, but that’s purely from the perspective of giving or withholding. Did you have a particular kind of reader in mind when you were writing? Maybe myself? I like what Toni Morrison said. I’m totally paraphrasing and butchering her beautiful words, but she said if there’s a book that you want to read that doesn’t exist, you should write it yourself. To some degree that was on my mind. I was writing something I wanted to read. Aren’t we always kind of imitating writers that we love? I was thinking about what kind of stories I want to read. So in terms of writers who are an influence, Jhumpa Lahiri also went to Barnard. I don’t know if she was an influence for you. But I was just wondering, who are the writers, Indian or otherwise, who have brought you to where you are today. Jhumpa Lahiri is definitely an influence for me because I didn’t know that women like her, and by extension, perhaps women like me, could write books about the things they wanted to write about. She gave me permission to write. I knew contemporary fiction existed, but I didn’t really read much of it. I read classics. And it was only in my 20s that I really became aware of contemporary fiction.