Poured Over: Monica Ali on Love Marriage

“For me, the novel form is the greatest expression because it has that room, that latitude to really explore for the full complexity of human existence and psychology and diversity, and there’s no other single format that I think comes close, even with the amazing ways in which television drama has grown and become more complex and more satisfying, I still think that it’s the novel form that did it first, and still does it best.”

Monica Ali made a splash with her Booker-nominated debut novel, Brick Lane — and she’s back with a new novel, Love Marriage, a story of love and family and manners set in modern-day London. Monica joins us on the show to talk about her unforgettable characters, balancing comedy and tragedy, Jane Austen’s influence, what screenwriting taught her about novel writing, and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff featuring book recommendations from Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Monica Lee has joined us. It’s been a while since her last novel. Love Marriage is just out. It is a portrait of a family in the UK and it is amazing, this book, it is wonderful. Monica, thank you so much for joining us. Would you set up Love Marriage for listeners which you let folks know who these characters are?

Monica Ali: Absolutely. So Love Marriage tells a story of Yasmin Ghormai who is 26 years old. She’s a junior doctor at a big London hospital and she is engaged to be married to Joe who is a fellow Doctor who is handsome, charming, rich, also very kind and sensitive. But then Joe does the unthinkable. And cheats on Yasmin. Yasmin is obviously distraught. But then Yasmin goes off and has revenge sex, which shocks her even more because she’s always thought of herself as a follower of the rules, a good person, a good girl, and she’s nurturing now the secret that she’s cheated on Joe as well. And unlike Joe, she does not confess to her infidelity. So it’s really eating her up. Little does she know that Joe is nursing an even bigger secret of his own. So at the start of the book, Yasmin really seems like she’s got her life together, got a plan. She knows what she’s doing. And then her life implodes and explodes all at the same time.

B&N: She has a younger brother, too, whose life is complicated and their father is a little disappointed that little brother’s degree is in sociology. Dad’s a doctor. You know, this is part of the immigrant story that we’re familiar with, but also Arif. He has a secret. And his secret is his baby daughter who’s about to appear, but also he is having a rough go of things he has been called out while he was working on his degree in college, he was called out by the UK security services and accused of terrorism. And so he’s really angry at the world. He’s really angry at his parents. Home life is really tense and the kids are still living at home with their parents. But we open the book as Yasmin and her parents are going to Joe’s mother’s house for dinner. And there are a couple of details that Yasmin drops where she says, Well, we’re leaving two hours early to basically get across town. And even though dinner will be provided, her mother has done hours and hours of cooking and has packed up lots of snacks. And Yasmin doesn’t see this as a gesture of goodwill or shared culture or anything else. Just Just like my parents are embarrassing me. My parents are embarrassing. Parents are embarrassing. You are writing about this exact moment in the UK, you’re writing about family and generational divides. And also, frankly, this is a good old fashioned comedy of manners in many, many ways, right?

MA: Yeah, particularly in the first half of the book. There was this sort of comedy of manners, there are two different worlds here that are coming together for the first time at the opening of the book. There’s the Ghoramis who are middle class Indian origin, living in a nice suburb of London. As you said, the father is a doctor. The mother is a housewife/homemaker but they are going off to meet Joe’s mother for the first time. Harriet, Joe’s mum, is a feminist icon, an academic, a writer, a well-known figure who is particularly well known for a memoir about all her lovers, all the men and the women. And Yasmin, therefore, is at a sort of agony or anxiety about this first meeting, I think any bride would be a little bit anxious in the situation. For Yasmin, it’s heightened not only by the differences in culture, but also the differences in class. So, Harriet is not just ordinary middle class. She’s properly posh, and she lives in a very wealthy part of London called Primrose Hill. And she’s very out there, you know, she’d be quite a lot for any family, let alone to the conservative Indian family. So she’s got all of these anxieties, but then actually, what happens is something rather different. Harriet embraces the Ghoramis. She’s delighted with her nieces Tiffin tins and Tupperware boxes of curries and samosas and so on. And she takes Anisah, the mother under her wing. And so this turns into Yasmin’s worst nightmare because Harriet starts to interfere in all of the wedding plans.

B&N: The friendship that Aneesh and Harriet develop was a little bit of a surprise. I don’t want to reveal too much, but it’s something that Yasmin struggles with because not only have the moms taken over her wedding planning, suddenly their religious elements to her wedding, and suddenly there are tents and locations. And here’s dad saying, but it’s my job to pay for this. And Dad’s not religious. And dad is just saying, Well, no, no, no, I have to take care of this. And Joe, and Yasmin are kind of sitting in the corner saying, okay, all of the parents can have all of the things that they want, and it goes from there. But part of the fun of this book is also the bits of seriousness where we see Yasmin struggling with her decision to be a doctor with what’s next with how she feels about marriage. And her little brother has a very different path from hers, he is not a doctor, he has a degree in sociology, which is very disappointing to dad because dad keeps saying, Well, what do you do with that? What do you do with that? What do you do with that? Why do you have that degree? The family’s mythology is really layered and smart, and complex and often very funny. But you can’t really have the comedy without the tragedy, right?

MA: Well, I’m glad you agree. I think comedy is really important for me, as a writer as a human as well. There are some dark and difficult things that happen in the book, referred to in the book, but it’s often comedy and humor other way of getting through those things. And comedy also keeps us intellectually honest. I think without it, the capacity for humans to delude themselves is almost limitless. And with comedy, we can just embrace all of our folly and flaws and endless striving and just hold it with compassion and tenderness.

B&N: There’s also more than one moment where the reader is going to understand that Yasmin is really angry, and she doesn’t know it. And she has no idea what to do with it. And there are other characters who are much more in touch with their sort of emotional landscape or people who are much more aware of that person’s landscape. But it’s interesting watching her because she’s a very modern young woman, she has her own life. Yes, she’s balancing, you know, living at home and having a job that she may or may not love. But we’re not sitting in a Jane Austen novel. And yet here she is unable to recognize her own anger.

MA: Yeah, I think she gropes her way towards it doesn’t she say? She is often suppressing her own desires, her own feelings, her own reactions, but then I think we see her opening up to those things, and whether that’s within the sexual relationship that she develops with her colleague, and not Joe, which surprises her and surprises her in the way that she has hidden her own desires, even from herself or whether it’s in the way that she tackles a patient’s relative who asked to see a British doctor. And yes, but actually challenges this person and gets herself into a lot of hot water because of it, too. She gets a sensitivity training course because this woman feels that she has been called a racist. In fact, Jasper’s never used that word, but Yasmin has nevertheless called her out. So I think we see Yasmin on a bit of a journey with allowing herself to feel the things that she feels, and then voice for things that she fails.

B&N: What surprised you about Yasmin, as you were writing her character? Was there anything?

MA: Yeah, I mean, I think I was surprised, honestly, when the relationship with her colleague. So originally, I thought that she would be so eaten up by guilt within the first encounter, that that could not linger around that she would be compelled to either reveal or cut ties with Joe or whatever it was, but actually, as she got deeper into that relationship, I found myself not knowing whether she would even end up with Pepperdine. I think because I didn’t know a lot of readers have been giving me the feedback that they didn’t know either. You know what was going to happen with that relationship and the relationship with Joe, which of them she would end up with.

B&N: And we are not spoiling that, not spoiling that here. Because it is one of the great pleasures of her journey, watching her decide what marriage means for her what partnership means for her. There are a couple of different points, actually, where you know, someone asked at one point is their marriage without risk in Yasmin’s family, there is this sort of mythology about how her parents met. And of course, it was a love marriage, which at the time would have been a really radical act because they were of different classes, too. So all of them are coming from different perspectives. But here we are, the 21st century and we’re still talking about marriage. And everyone has a POV on this.

MA: Yes, just to make it clear for listeners as well Love Marriage. The title refers to the founding story of the Ghorami family, which is that this poor boy Chaukat, Yasmin’s father, who grew up in great poverty, marries the girl from the well to do Calcutta family. This was a love match. And that for Yasmin is sometimes a source of strength as in when she talks to her mother about some doubts, the troubles that she’s having with Joe, having found out about his infidelity. And she takes what her mother is saying, as meaning Well, love will conquer all. And she thinks about her parents love marriage as a source of great strength, but also it can be a source of frustration, and disempowerment. Because it’s something then to live up to, you know, it can be a constraint as well as a source of strength and freedom. Yeah, I’m always playing around with those concepts of what is really a freedom and what looks like a freedom, but it’s actually a constraint, I think within the book.

B&N: And Joe actually thinks marriage is going to fix him. He’s working on some stuff of his own. And as you hinted earlier, it is big, it is very, very big, but he genuinely believes that his past is behind him, and he’s going to settle down and he’s going to be married. And it’s going to make him a good husband and a good father simply because he has deemed it so.

MA: He so wants that he so wants that for himself and for Yasmin, and it’s kind of eating him alive, the possibility that he might end up destroying this idealized notion that he has of how perfect life will be once they’re married, that will cure him of everything that ails him, which is why it’s necessary for him to go into therapy. To start to understand himself, you see the beginning of the book, Yasmin rather envies the Sangsters, Joe and Harriet for how open they are, how they discuss everything, unlike the Ghorami household, things can’t be discussed, where sex is never mentioned, as it says on the opening line up the book that as the story opens up and continues, what we and also, Yasmin comes to understand is that there thanks to the just as messed up, if not more so, than the Ghoramis. And in fact, Jared Harris, they can’t be open, and talk freely about the most important things within the family because they don’t understand the things that are most important. So yeah, and again, the idea at the beginning of the book that at which I’m sort of playing with these tropes of the South Asian culture is more closed, and therefore in some ways more inverted commas backwards. And the more progressive liberal open western model is therefore freeing, but actually, some of Joe’s so-called freedoms are anything but free, really, he’s actually shackled by a lot of what on the surface looks like freedom.

B&N: And the same can be said for Harriet in a lot of ways and Jasmine’s little brother, Arif, things come to a head between him and Dad. Dad essentially throws him out cuts off his allowance, everything is done. And at that moment, Aneesa decamps to Harriet’s she leaves her husband. And here’s another moment where you’ve got this white guy pining for marriage and essentially a stay at home mom decides Yes, I’m leaving. This is not okay. And she says to her husband, if you don’t make things right with our son, I’m not coming home. Dad, of course does not handle this well, but Yasmin is struggling with this idea too that her mother has to camped and she’s like, why are you leaving? Dad? Why are you leaving Dad? You’re playing with all of these sorts of role reversals in a way.

MA: I mean, he Yasmin is horrified on a number of different grounds when Anisah moves on with Harriet, first of all, she’s worried that she will get stuck with her father because he won’t be able to manage alone. And secondly, she feels that Harriet is sort of using Anisah almost like a pet, you know, or an exhibit zoo exhibit to show off to her friends liberal credentials, and that she’s going to exotify her and to this sort of integration by steamroller approach. And Harriet, she can be annoying and grating and just too much in your face. But Harriet, there’s more to Harriet, and to Anisah, than Yasmin really realizes. So first, and I think Harriet has a good heart. You could see her on the surface as an example of white privilege. But there’s more to her than now. You know, she’s got her own problems, her own demons, her own struggles, and she makes a genuine connection with Anisah. And I think she totally redeems herself in the way that she facilitates Yasmin’s ability to see her own mother as a truly extraordinary person that she actually is.

B&N: I have to say, I really love Anisah as a character, but I’m wondering, Yasmin is so much a heart of this book. Why not write this in the first person? Why write it in the third person?

MA: I think a question we end up we get three different perspectives. Yasmin is definitely given the most airtime. And then we have the perspective of Sandor who is Joe’s therapist, and it’s only via Sandor, that we get Joe’s story. And then we have Harriet, as well, through a number of diary entries. We also get her perspective, why didn’t I write this as a first person? I don’t even think I’m comfortable writing in the first person. But I don’t know why. Don’t know.

B&N: Fair answer, it’s just her path is so much more complicated, in some ways than say, Harriet’s or her mother’s. I wouldn’t argue honestly, that it needed to be written in the first person. But there’s something about Yasmin that I keep coming back to. And it might simply just be her voice. Was she the first character who showed up for you?

MA: Both? Yasmin and Harriet. So I was working on two different stories, those two main characters, and I wasn’t sure that either was going to be turning into a book. But then I had this lightbulb moment when I thought, well, what if I bring them together? What if I brought these two different worlds together, and then everything clicked for me, and I knew it was the book that I had to write, I knew it was going to be a lot of fun to write as well. And there was a sort of common thread between the two stories, which was that they both looked at these women’s love lives and texts as a universal impulse, or near universal, I would say, that could tie these very disparate worlds together. So that was how I got into the book. And as soon as I had my first sentence, and the Ghorami household sex was never mentioned, then I was off and running.

B&N: You at one point had published four books in a very short amount of time. And there’s been a bit of a break between your last book in 2011. And now this one, so did it take you 11 years to write this book? Or were you just sort of noodling some other things? And then this book showed up when it showed up?

MA: I mean, I should claim that it took 11 years should Donna Tartt does that doesn’t she? No, I stopped writing for a while because I had a major loss of confidence. So I just stopped and then when I wasn’t writing, I got depressed. And then that fed into the lack of confidence. So it was kind of a downward spiral for a while, but I came out of it and what actually what helped me to come out of it was I started trying to write for television, basically, because I was watching a lot of TV drama as depressed people sometimes do. So I thought maybe I can do that. And I spent some time teaching myself how to write screenplays. And then I worked with a number of production companies have scripts commissioned, nothing ended up on screen. But I really enjoyed the process. And it just reminded me that I need to be writing no matter what. So that kind of got me back into writing prose and starting this novel. And now I’m adapting Love Marriage for television. So I feel like that apprenticeship that I served has not gone to waste, you know, it’s come back round again.

B&N: That’s really excellent. Because screenwriting is such a different art from novels, you have to strip everything down to the bones, essentially, and just keep moving the story forward. But you have to hand it over then to set designers and actors and let it go.

MA: Yeah, well, that will be exciting that, you know, the main challenges are structural, really. So things that might happen later on in the book might need to be brought forward, or things that happen off stage in the book need to obviously be seen and visualized. But you know, the great thing, one of the great things about this process is that I wrote and wrote and wrote. For my first draft, I wrote 240,000 words, short, I knew is way too long. And then I cut and cut cut, until it was a more manageable size. But some of those scenes that I had to cut, I can now bring back for the TV version. So that’s a real pleasure. I’m just enjoying spending time with Yasmin and Joe as well.

B&N: They are a genuinely unforgettable set of characters. And I can see why you wouldn’t want to leave especially the two of them. I why you would not want to leave them behind, I can see someone besides you is also going to have a lot of fun bringing them to the screen, I think, do you have a favorite moment, maybe from even their relationship, but a favorite moment from the book that made you think oh, yeah, this is beyond the first line, which obviously is a terrific first line.

MA: Oh, gosh, well, I mean, there’s many scenes that I really enjoyed writing. And there were some in particular that I was dreading writing, namely, the sex scenes. Because I’d always been able to get away before without writing any sex scenes in my book. So with my first novel Brick Lane, for instance, the heroine does have an affair, Nazneen has an affair, that it was in keeping with her character that I could just close the door when she gets in bed with her lover that was in keeping with her character. But with Yasmin, sex is such an important part of her growth. As a woman as an individual. She’s finding out who she is, who she could be, who she wants to be, how she wants to operate in the world. And I knew I could not bottle out of writing the sex scenes. I always absolutely dreading, you know, I was sweating, there’s a reward in the UK called The Bad Sex Awards, which is the award their new writer wants to wear. So I really wasn’t looking forward to right. There’s only two scenes, but actually, when it came down to it, I think because it didn’t feel gratuitous because it’s so integral to the character development. It was actually fine. And then particularly in a period sex scene, I had great fun writing it.

B&N: Pepperdine is an interesting dude. He’s not quite what I would have expected. Did you know who he was when he showed up? Or were you just kind of like Alright, let’s see where this goes. Because I know we’ve talked a little bit about not knowing where Yasmin was going with him, per se, or ultimately with Jeff, but he’s a very unflappable guy.

MA: Enigmatic. My publishers Varago in the UK. There is a Pepperdine fan club, they’ve all got the hots for Pepperdine. I mean, there’s something very, very straightforward about him. In comparison to the other characters. What you see is what you get and Yasmin can hardly believe that, she’s not used to that. So I think that was part of his attraction. I think he points out that she’s got a mean streak, and she’s really horrified. Me? Really? He called her out for being sometimes a little bit on the childish side or peevish or whatever. And again, she has a hard time accepting those home truths, but I think that’s maybe why lots of readers have really warmed to him because he doesn’t take any of her shit.

B&N: Part of it, for me, as I was reading too, is that he is more emotionally mature than she is. And you know, of course, women for centuries, we’ve been given this rap that we’re much more in touch with our emotions and we know what’s going on. And we just want to take care of people and blah, blah, blah. And in fact, he even says it to her at one point, he’s like, you’re so emotionally available, what is going on? You’re so emotionally unavailable. And she just looks at him like he has nine heads. And it’s actually He’s not wrong. Again, I want to come back to the fun of all of these role reversals. And when I say role reversals, I mean, you’re sort of just tweaking people on the ear and saying, Well, this is what we’ve thought for so long. Why is this still conventional wisdom, or you’re playing with immigrant narratives, you’re playing with marriage, and gender and age as well. And ultimately, we’re always kind of talking about power and who has it and who doesn’t? And how we find it.

MA: I think it will say about the assumptions that we all make about each other. And, you know, we can’t get through life without making assumptions. But sometimes it’s a good idea to just slow down, step back and test the truth of those. That’s what Yasmin is also, learning as she goes along.

B&N: She really likes to be right. She really likes to be right. And it’s fun to see her evolve, as some of us like to say she leads with her chin. But I think ultimately, she gets a happy ending. And that’s kind of all I’m gonna say. But I think the book ends on a hopeful note for a lot of folks, actually.

MA: I think it’s an optimistic ending, isn’t it? It’s a hopeful ending. And I don’t think that gives away as you say, what actually occurs.

B&N: Can we talk about some of your literary influences for a second, not just the influences maybe on this book, particularly, because obviously, you will see an experience that sort of drawing room comedy and sort of that class awareness. But who are some of the writers you turn to just as perennial favorites?

MA: Well, Jane Austen, as you might guess. I think, you know, she’s been a particular influence in the writing of Love Marriage. So she wrote constantly about courtship and engagements and marriage, but through that supposedly rather narrow domestic prism, she actually showed us a lot about the society of the time about money. She’s very precise about who has how much, about class, about the position of women and so on. And I think that even though we’re at a totally different landscape, now in London with Love Marriage, and it’s multicultural, and Yasmin’s young, professional women, and so on, there’s still a lot around the family dynamics and the customs and rituals that surround an impending wedding. That can be a very useful lens, on to some of those wider aspects of society. So I definitely cite Jane Austen as an influence. And then some of my favorite writers that I go back to time and time again, Tolstoy can’t imagine life without him. And then a really diverse range of writers from Naipau to Graham Greene. Balzac. Flaubert. I mean, so many, really, but I go back to the classics a lot.

B&N: Are you looking for story when you’re doing that? Are you looking at their characters? And how their characters respond to the world? Because each of those is a very specific reading experience.

MA: Am I allowed to say both?

B&N: Sure. Whatever the answer is, is the answer.

MA: I write from character, and I’m drawn to writers who can really bring that complexity and depth and nuance that makes you feel that you’ve really got inside the head of this other person and you start to see the world from their point of view, but I am not averse to story. I do think we’re hard wired for story. We’ve been telling stories since caveman and cavewoman era and stories, how we make sense by lives. So yeah, for me, it’s both.

B&N: So we’ve talked about influences. We’ve talked about your break to work on screenplays, and essentially learn a new craft. But what is it about writing prose that you really love the most?

MA: For me, the novel form is the greatest expression because it has that room, that latitude to really explore for the full complexity of human existence and psychology and diversity, and there’s no other single format that I think comes close, even with the amazing ways in which television drama has grown and become more complex and more satisfying, I still think that it’s the novel form that did it first, and still does it best.

B&N: I love that answer. So you’re working on the screenplay, obviously, for Love Marriage. But is there another novel in the works to.

MA: No. No, I’m on book tour in Germany at the moment, and I’m talking to you, and there’s all the summer literary festivals coming up across the UK. So between that and the screenplay and family, I haven’t yet. You’re making me feel guilty. I feel like I’ve got to excuse myself. But I haven’t yet started work.

B&N: Well, you’re just taking notes, you’re just taking notes for whatever the next thing is, oh, no, don’t feel guilty about it. I just didn’t know if you were one of those writers who always had something in the works kind of thing as the new book is coming out. There are some writers who really prefer to do it that way. And I just asked, because I never know what the answer is gonna be.

MA: Yeah, no. I’m working on a short story for Varago. The publisher is going to turn 50 next year, and they are doing a collection of short stories. The title of each will be a synonym for Verago. So that’s what’s cooking at the moment.

B&N: That sounds very cool. I did not realize that they were staring at 50. That’s not a small thing. Monica Ali, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over the new novel is Love Marriage and it is out now.

MA: Thank you so much. It’s been such fun talking to you today.