Poured Over: Sarah Thankam Mathews on All This Could Be Different

Miwa Messer

“So you know, something that is a big part of my project…is actually this idea that we deserve pleasure. I think that pleasure and care, these are antidotes against various kinds of violence and degradation that we’re all beset with. And so for me, when I wrote this novel, I did not write it for a critic at The New York Times, you know. I wrote it for the past version of me. And I wrote for someone who would need to read this, who would be reading this book after work on the subway.” Sarah’s Thankam Mathews is making a terrific debut with All This Could Be Different—longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction and a finalist for our own Discover Prize—and she joins us on the show to
talk about channeling her characters, subverting the coming-of-age novel, challenging the expectations of the immigrant experience, queerness, finding our people and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books (Episode):
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
Luster by Raven Leilani
The New Me by Halle Butler

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

Full transcript for this episode:

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Sarah Thankam Mathews has written a very cool, cool coming of age story that we haven’t really seen before. And it starts with friendship, and it goes into class. And oh, man, this is so…I’m really looking forward to this conversation. The novel is called All This Could Be Different and Sarah is joining us today. And Sarah, would you just introduce yourself to listeners, please?

Absolutely, Miwa. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Hey, everyone, I’m Sarah Thankam Mathews. I live in Brooklyn, New York now, but I’ve lived a bunch of places before this. I grew up in Oman and India, I emigrated to the US when I was 17. And I’m out here to talk about my first book, All This Could Be Different, which is, in a sentence, I would say the story of a young Indian woman who moves to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city where she does not know a soul to work her first job. And she reckons with her first love and her first real friends.

I love this book. I love the way you write about friendship and that’s where we’re going to start because there aren’t enough novels about friendship. I mean, we’ve all read a million, some good and some not, great novels about family and siblings and parents and children and all of that. But friendship is territory that doesn’t always get explored entirely like it should. So can we talk about Sneha and her crew, Thom, and Ahmed and Tig. We’re going to get to her great love in a second, but let’s start with this friend group, because I think you were very deliberate in who these people are.

I’m a romantic about friendship. I think it also has like tremendous revolutionary power in that friendship as a relational unit is not so easily, not as easily, co-opted, and commodified, you know, by racial capitalism, and by the state. You know, there aren’t yet registries and regulations around friendships and the commitments, you know, that two people make to each other as friendship. So I think that this is just something I went in wanting to write about at the essential, like, almost holy nature of what it means to make deep abiding friendships that stay with you as you grow up and grow older and work to survive and thrive together. So it definitely came from this place of intention. And I thought, what if I wrote this coming-of-age novel, which often can look like this somewhat, you know, traditional conventional genre, right, where it’s young person, and they’re adrift, and they’re dealing with their problems, and they become adults in a very particular way, which is to say that they reproduce society as it exists. They, you know, find a partner, they do the thing that’s expected of them. But before they do the thing that’s expected of them, they have this period of freedom and rebellion and what have you.

And so I really thought I would try to do this sort of turn on the coming-of-age novel by almost doing a little bit of bait and switch where you as the reader are going in thinking okay, I’m going to read about this hot queer love story, will they won’t they, you know, a little bit like Sally Rooney’s Normal People where you’re reading at first to find out whether she gets the girl. But then as time goes by and as the pages turn, you find yourself as a reader becoming invested in these friends that you mentioned. So when Sneha, the protagonist– is new to Milwaukee, she joins a newfangled invention in 2013 of dating apps, and she meets someone called Tig who is in so many ways… I think that if Sneha is the novel’s heart, Tig is the novel’s brain. In a lot of ways, Tig is a black gender queer, Milwaukee native, a little bit older than Sneha. They are bolder and braver than pretty much any of the other characters without being you know, sort of inhumanely perfect or saving everybody. And Tig is really sort of this proto revolutionary in the making. They have a little bit of crush on Sneha then they’re like, you know what, it’s not meant to be, we’re going to be friends. Thom is Sneha’s like straight dude friend from college. Some readers have described him to me as a little bit of a Bernie Bro.

He’s super bro-y. He’s so bro-y.

He is bro-y. The thing about my protagonist, Sneha, is that she is in her way, bro-y too. Not so much in presentation, not so much in how she looks, but there’s definitely a sort of masculinity within her pride, a fear of losing face, you know, the way in which she relates to the women she dates. Big bro energy there. And I think that she and Thom are drawn together first and foremost by this sort of emotional valence that they both have. And Thom is very much sort of interested as the book progresses. They’re both coworkers is the other thing that’s interesting about their friendship. They, you know, are friends and homies, but they also are competing for the same resources and one of them is getting paid more. We learned that later. So yeah, I think Thom is as he gets sort of unhappier and unhappier in his work life, I think he becomes, you know, a little bit more overtly lefty in his politics. And they’re large sections of the novel where the characters like argue and hold very different opinions about how things should be politically. Then there’s Sneha’s ex-boyfriend and current friend. And then there’s this sort of larger cast of minor characters, I’ll spare us but basically, this novel tries to create a world and give it to the reader and say, spend your time with these people. See what you think.

And what’s really important to me is that they’re not all the same. You know, we’ve seen friend groups, especially on television, pardon the pun, where there’s so little difference between anyone, and the idea that you’ve given your characters a range of experiences, and yeah, they’re all sort of starting out, work is a big part of their lives. Work is a big part of their identity. Having their own money really matters. And what happens when the money runs out, also really matters. So to see these guys sort of thrown into a space, and see how they react. I’m going to quote Tig for a second who says, you know, friendship can be work. And Sneha does not get that. She does not get that in the least.

Course. I mean, she’s really young, right? And the book, in so many ways, is the story of her moral and political education, and really the story of a self being formed through other people, and primarily these friends that we’ve mentioned.

And also, I mean, it’s just fun to read about sex and money and class and friendship and making your way in the world. And one of the things I really appreciate about Sneha, too, is that she’s messy. She’s really messy. She does stuff where you’re like, oh, oh, you’re saying the quiet parts out loud. So I just want to talk to you about giving yourself freedom to write an imperfect character who just gets to be herself. I mean, we’re still in a place where, you know, people like their heroines to be a certain way, sometimes.

They absolutely do. Listen, my job is to give people the whole truth of what a character can be. That is like my first and most important job as a novelist. I think that we are living in a time when there’s a convergence of various kinds of moral unrespectability, panics and politics, combined with longstanding tropes of racism that deny people who are marginalized their full humanity. And what it means I think, to be afforded full humanity is to be given the latitude to make mistakes, the latitude to be something other than demure and delightful. Sneha sort of gestures of this while thinking about her father, who is someone who’s had his own, like, very difficult journey in the US before. You know, going back to India, where they are from, and one of the things that she says is you are thinking about him, but she’s also really talking about herself as you are an immigrant, which means you are here on sufferance. Only the true American, you know, sort of like to paraphrase, is allowed a certain kind of freedom to desire, which is to say, to be difficult. And so I think both being very transparent and explicit about these characters’ desires and their capacity for being difficult to other people, to each other, was something that’s really important to me. It’s something that I think we all are owed, this sort of full humanity.

Yeah, and respectability politics are something that just drive me up a tree. They just completely drive me up a tree because they’re also assigned to you by someone who is not you. And so the idea that you’re trying to make your way in the world—and she is, she’s trying to play by the rules. She gets what she thinks is a good job. She’s doing it. She’s sending money to her parents. She’s got an apartment, under weird circumstances with a creepy neighbor downstairs. I mean, all sorts of stuff where she’s not really necessarily thinking it through, it’s more like she’s checking off boxes. Part of that comes with denying that she’s queer. But she knows. I mean, she knows, and she’s looking to connect, but her parents.

Absolutely. I mean, I wanted to tell a very, what I frame to myself as a very honest and South Asian queer story. I didn’t want a traditional coming out scene, because that did not mimic the experiences of many people close to me, in my community. What seemed the truest thing that I could do was to sort of gesture, and to be clear, there is no monolithic queer experience, there’s no monolithic South Asian experience, but they do together, there’s still no monolithic South Asian queer experience. But I think that I have felt a loneliness as a queer person, like seeing some of the Americanized or westernized white narratives around queerness and coming into your own as a queer person. And so yeah, I think that you’re totally right that there’s a very particular kind of denial going on. But what I find interesting is Sneha absolutely knows that she is gay as a day in May. But she has created this frame for herself with different sections of her life, and her various kinds of desires, you know, because desires aren’t only a factor of the body and the flesh and who we want to sleep with. She’s held them off, you know, like, as separate from each other as like cells in an Excel spreadsheet, which is what she spends all her day with at work. And she thinks, I have my youth, I have a few years I am in this country, my parents are an ocean away and for a few years I’m going to be myself. And you can see this sort of desperation, almost preemptive grief, driving some of her decisions. I think it really contributes to her avoidance. And it comes from this heart-rending quality of dreaming so small for herself. I think not just when it comes to romance, but I think also, all she dreams for herself professionally, otherwise, is safety. You know, she doesn’t think of any kind of self-actualization. She says like let me make enough money to take care of myself and take care of my family. And that’s it. Let me sleep with some women and not get attached. And at some point, like bow my head and like, have a sexless loveless marriage with some man my parents pick. There’s something very sad about settling to the degree she plans to settle. And I think that the novel is in many ways a sad one. But it’s also, to me, like deeply hopeful and happy. I think both in the sort of larger political frame of gestures towards, but also personally because Sneha ends up with so much more than she hopes for.

Well, her friends get her through, but when she meets Marina, this dancer that she ends up falling for in ways that she wasn’t expecting to, she tells a whopper of a lie, though. She tells Marina that her parents are dead.

She does.

I mean, she is compartmentalizing in ways that not everyone does. And yet…

As you said, she’s messy.

She is messy. But watching her try to navigate all of these different spaces with not a lot of resources. And by that, I mean yes, she has a roof over her head, she has a job. But she doesn’t actually have the language to describe a lot of what’s happening. And she doesn’t quite want to, there’s obviously a big secret that we’re not going to reveal because that would take the fun out of it. But she is grappling with a lot as well. And this whole idea of picking up and going to Milwaukee where she has no roots whatsoever. I want to talk about Milwaukee for a second, I have some folks who love that city to bits. And I thought it was a great choice. It was a really interesting choice to take her off the coast, but also to take her out of places like Dallas or Houston, or Chicago. There’s something very specific about living in sort of a smaller size city. But you had another reason for putting her in Milwaukee. And that’s Milwaukee and its history. Can we talk about that for a second?

Yeah. What a lovely question. I just want to appreciate you for a moment for asking me that. I think, you know, frankly, I lived in Milwaukee, it was an important time in my life. I too as a young person, bumbling my way through life, falling in love and making friends and I left. And I really revisited Milwaukee in my writing and started to learn more and more about it. And one of the things that really burned into my brain at the time that I was sort of doing this research, doing this reading, was an expansion of the sort of brief factoid of knowledge that I had when I lived there, which was Milwaukee, at one point had a socialist mayor, that’s what I thought. What I did not know that was that the city was under the governance for 40 years of a series of leftist socialist mayors. And why I thought it was so important was not just that that particular fact, but their particular brand of governance, they were called the sewer socialists, first as a derogatory term. But something that they started embracing, saying, yes, we do want sewers for are the workers. We do want schools, we do want parks. And what they ended up doing was this really incredible tangible translation into reality of utopian ideals. And these were also immigrants, I think that’s sometimes easy to forget, given the way in which this country can sort of boil immigrants down into the same sort of assimilated mass after a couple of generations. These were immigrants, some of them, you know, less than like 10 years off the boat, bringing the culture and the politics of their native lands to Wisconsin, which is, I think, one of the most fascinating places in America. I really appreciated this idea that some of the characters like Tig, for example, even Thom would try to put some ideals into practice and wrestle with the really difficult work of dealing with other human beings and the ways in which they’re maddening and try to make a vision real. I liked that sort of mirroring of the novel’s action and actual historical fact.

Well, I appreciate too the fact that these guys are actually… as much as they love each other, and they do and I’m not necessarily talking about in a sexual way, but they love each other. And yet, they look at each other constantly and say, how are you like this? Why can I not figure it out? And part of Sneha’s whole thing too, is that she’s decided, she’s compartmentalized her life so hard, that she’s got the before time, she’s got the right now time, and then she’s got the oh, I’m going to go do what my parents want me to do. It’s an exhausting way to live.

Absolutely. I think that really what the novel is interested in– yes, is friendship, in like, what does it mean to build a community but in like, very honest terms. And not precious about community. I don’t think it’s like some great panacea for everything. I would argue that Sneha in many ways is someone who has been failed by the community she has been a part of. In a variety of ways, and it contributes to her being. You know, the way she is carrying some of the burdens she is. And so I think that lives alongside this sort of nascent community that’s building in the novel. And a question that I’m just sort of endlessly interested in is, what does it mean to love across difference, right? In ways that are honest, and don’t involve self-erasure of, you know, the person who has more of the burdens of some of the difference. And that’s what so much of the book involves, right? I think, much has been made of the novel’s focus on friendship. I love that, as we know, I think that friendship is important. But I also think something that can be missed, like sort of novel’s final coda, which I would argue, is a movement from friendship to comradeship. To friendship with common aims, shared vision, and the choice to give yourself over to these people in ways that go beyond meeting a couple of times a year. And connecting and witnessing each other. And that’s a beautiful thing. But it’s a whole different kettle of fish, to try to build something with your friends, or, you know, whoever it is you’re close to. And I think in order to gesture towards the possibility of that, you have to be honest about the difficulties of that. You have to be honest, you have to talk about the difficulty of your friend who does not share the same politics as you, not thinking that way. And ultimately, you know, the difference that you allude to Miwa, this idea that the characters think differently, feel differently, all that has to do with the personal histories that are streaming out behind them like invisible jellyfish tentacles and their reckoning with each other. I want us to do that for other people in our lives.

The beauty of the novel, though, is that we get to see everyone’s sort of interior. I mean, this is why I love fiction as an art form, because you get to noodle in and around all of these different backstories. There’s some minor characters who when they connect, I had a nice little oh, oh, that makes perfect sense. And you know exactly what I’m talking about, but we’re not going to reveal it here. But I had a nice moment with that when I was like, I so get that. But the idea again, that we see the evolution of these characters into a community. That’s not something necessarily, I mean, you can shorthand it in different art forms, I suppose, but it takes a little bit of the fun away. Because you have a cast, they’re all so well intentioned and yet they kind of don’t have the tools. And really, ultimately they do find their way despite themselves. I would agree with you and say this is a very hopeful novel. I think it’s also very funny. And that’s the beauty of it, for me, is the universal truth that comes out of someone else’s story. I mean, have I ever lived in Milwaukee? No, I have not. More importantly, you’ve got a set of friends who are coming of age right after the Great Recession. And it’s a moment in our history, in America’s history, where a lot of us were thinking, oh, we’ve come out on the other side of something big. And we’ve got a president that none of us was really expecting, and then everything changes. But you’re writing about a moment that was genuinely… we felt like we were on the cusp of something bigger than us.

Absolutely. I mean, I think that I am interested in general with, like, in writing fiction that can serve as a sort of prologue to the present moment. You know, some of the causative mechanisms for any kind of present moment, the final 30 pages of the novel takes place in 2019. The majority of the actual novel takes place in 2012, 2013. One of the things that I feel like we’re beset with in our culture is the kind of bizarre to me, amnesia. I think some of that has to do with the present, like the extreme presentness of social media. But really, I encountered people all the time who cannot remember how people were, like literally how the zeitgeist was five years ago. I think in order to have a coherent society, in order to truly move forward, you need to be able to theorize and remember beyond the like, extreme present. So that’s really what informed that choice.

Okay, but the other thing, and I’m riffing off of something you said in a different interview, but I really, I love this idea. And it goes hand in hand with what you just said. But you’re talking about writing against shame. I think that’s a really important point to raise because you’re trying to tell a different kind of immigrant narrative, you’re trying to tell a different kind of queer story, you’re trying to tell a different kind of coming of age. And there is space for all of these different stories to happen. But yeah, shame is some powerful mojo. And the idea that you are specifically writing against that is really interesting.

Totally. So you know, something that is a big part of my project, as a novelist, in particular, is actually this idea that like, we deserve pleasure. I think that pleasure and care, these are antidotes against various kinds of violence and degradation that we’re all beset with. And so for me, when I wrote this novel, I did not write it for a critic at the New York Times, you know, I wrote it for the past version of me in so many ways. And I wrote for someone who would need to read this, you know, who would be reading this book after work on the subway. And so I wanted the novel to hold their attention. And that informs so many of the choices, some of which you sort of alluded to, whether it’s like trying to have moments of humor peppered throughout, because I think that’s definitely one source of pleasure for me. Like, the chuckle or the smirk or the rare laugh out loud moments of a book. There’s food writing throughout the novel that ranges from the lush to the like, oh, my God, I cannot believe she’s eating that. There are also these really frank and lucid sex scenes. And when I started writing them, I knew there would be sex scenes. And I think that knowledge came from this place of like, I want the novel to be, you know, smart and have political force, but also be fun and juicy. I still envision the kind of sex scene that like faded to black, you know, after enough happened, so that the reader would get the idea. And then as I paid attention to my main character, and really kind of came to love her and care for her, I realized that someone who is absolutely saturated with shame, you know, and it has to do with the specificities of how she was raised with the broader culture in which she moved through, where there’s just so much shame around the body, around sex, and especially the queer body having sex and being intimate. And I thought it was just really important to me, to not let a certain kind of respectability, a certain kind of delicacy, serve as the Venetian mask for what is just, frankly, shame and embarrassment and a desire to please the MPAA and cut to black. So the sex scenes of the novel are really embodied, you really see what’s happening in the mind and between these two people who are trying to, maybe the most precise ways to say like, transcend. You know, like, transcend the moment and their difference and just like experience full pleasure and neuroticism and connection. So that’s what felt important to me.

And I think that connection too, I mean, well, one, that’s what everyone’s looking for. I mean, even internet trolls want connection.

That’s the word right there.

Yeah, right? Like, I mean, honestly, it just people’s primary desire. Now connection takes a million different forms, but that really is…People are not great at being alone. The choices that we sometimes make so that we’re not alone actually make it much more complicated. And we ended up being alone. And the way you write about intimacy, and how scary it can be, yeah, you’re holding tight to that. And I appreciate it. Because I do think that is such a human, it’s such a sign of human growth when you can get to a point where you’re like, oh, I know how to actually be intimate with another human being. And again, there are levels of that, there’s levels of connection, there all of these things. But wow, Sneha does not like to be vulnerable. And she puts herself in vulnerable positions because she doesn’t want to be vulnerable.

Absolutely. It’s the paradox of who we are as people, right? And I think there’s so many levels to it. I think that one, it just made sense. So this character had this like essential paradox of wanting so deeply to connect and to be known and to be loved. And, because of who she is, and the choices she keeps making, just found herself again and again in these situations where she is unknowable, and thus unlovable, right? And I just found that very fruitful to write about.

To tell a very quick personal anecdote has always stayed with me, was this moment when I was a young person living in Milwaukee. And I went to a talk with my friend. And it was to hear this activist and community organizer who was working on domestic violence issues. This organizer was among the most moving and inspirational people I’ve ever seen in my life. You know? Like, I had tears in my eyes. And my friend who had some really meaningful experiences with domestic violence went up to her after saying, how can I become part of this work? Like, how can I join you? This organizer looked to my friend, and frankly, me, because I was next to my friend, dead in the eyes and just said, you need to heal. And there was just this moment of like, you know, I think both of us, like, didn’t speak for the next five minutes. I think that so much of what I have observed, whether it’s in organizing, or I’ve worked in sort of the grassroots of organizing, but I’ve also worked in politics. I’ve also worked in business environments that are very interested in social impact, etc. But often, there’s not meaningful attention paid to cleaning out one’s own home, so to speak. You know? To healing as people. So many incredible organizing efforts and initiatives fail because people don’t know how to work together and people have their own hang-ups. So I wanted to gesture towards that as well.

I want to step away from this specific story for a second, because also, I feel like we’re getting close to possibly revealing some stuff that I don’t want to reveal. I want to talk about you as an artist and some of your literary influences for a second. I mean, there are some that I think I could guess, but I would really like to have that piece of the conversation where we can talk about sort of how you got to be the writer that you are now.

Oh, my God. I mean, I feel indebted to a whole stable of writers, chief among them, I think of Arundhati Roy, who is you know, who grew up very close to my hometown in India, in Kerala. I think about Toni Morrison who I became acquainted with her work when I was a teenager growing up in Muscat, Oman when I never met a white person or a black person. And it just really, her work really changed my life and made me decide that I want to be a writer. I feel like the lane of the work that I’m doing now, a lot of it I feel like I like owes a debt to Jamaica Kincaid. I think, Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, it’s a sort of foremother for I think both the character of Sneha and also All This Could Be Different. Where there’s like this mixture of like musicality, but also incisiveness, and like a quiet politics that lives fully within the person. You know? It isn’t sort of like waving the flag all the time. And then I think about a really diverse and varied stable of writers, you know, but those are some of the ones that come to mind. Were they the ones that you wondered about?

I would have expected all of them to be honest, but I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t assuming things. But I’m just saying that based on you know, the writing and sort of where your brain goes and sort of where I was following along with.

I think the other exciting thing to me is like, I think that literature is a long conversation across time. And also place. But what I love about living in the moment is you know, it’s like we have thankfully moved beyond a single story politics, there are lots of writers doing really amazing and exciting work. So I feel in my contemporaries, I also feel like a lot of the sense of like, oh, I’m writing stuff that’s in conversation with your stuff. And that’s lovely too.

Who are some of those people? Because I’m always excited to hear what folks have been reading.

I mean, absolutely. I think that when I finished All This Could Be Different, and around the time that I was editing it, I read Raven Leilani’s novel, Luster, which is so amazing. And I was just like, oh, these novels are trying to do different things but they’re also like absolutely… there’s so many things about their protagonists that are in conversation with each other. I think The New Me by Halle Butler does a lot of interesting stuff with work and the conditions and quality of what it means to live and work under capitalism. I think that there are writers like SJ Sindu, for example, or Sabrina Imbler, who are really doing exciting things with queer vernacular and queer characters. I think about this book, in some ways as, and this is more from what other people have told me about their reaction to the book, I think that some of Sally Rooney’s novels are engaging with similar ideas, just sort of using different forms. And I like the idea that you know, both of us are working on some of the same concepts, just sort of using different forms and different characters and places.

Well, I think also, generationally, you guys are peers. I think you’re at least very close. I like the idea that there’s a new generation of writers that are saying, hey, wait a minute, this other stuff has not worked. The way your characters are saying, hey, this other stuff has not worked. And I think that’s really important.

But I do I have another question for you. Because you have an MFA from Iowa, which is one of the best programs in the country. But did you need an MFA to write this book? Because this is not the book you were working on when you were in school. And you’ve said that you wrote this book very quickly, which I find amazing because it doesn’t read like something that was sort of written in a hot minute.

I feel like my MFA gave me time and resources to learn how to write something long form. Mostly through trial and error. But yeah, I bend in the book I wrote when I was in Iowa. And I’m still trying to make meaning of what those years were to me, frankly. And I almost didn’t do it. I almost didn’t apply. I didn’t get into most MFA programs I applied for and then sort of at the last minute, I was like, why not? Let me see. I applied there. And I think my time there was really useful again, like less in an industry focused way. I went in being like, let me use these two years to come up with a finished book. And I finished the book, and the book was not ready for any kind of publication. I wasn’t comfortable with it. So yeah, I wrote All This Could Be Different in 2020. And I was so grateful to be far away from the world of the MFA, which is not a knock on Iowa. It’s a knock on a kind of cultural setting where you are, unfortunately, a little bit set up to be in competition with your peers. And you’re thinking about all these sort of extrinsic factors and incentives. You’re like, well, how will how will critics respond to this? I wrote this novel while on employment, the Cares Act was thanked in my acknowledgments. I wrote it while organizing in my neighborhood in New York, I wrote it when surrounded by the love of friends and community. Very few of whom, are at the time, were writers. Some of them definitely are, and they’re some of the best people. And I feel like it made for a better book. And that’s all I have to say about that.

That’s fair. But I mean, when you have to take work out of the theoretical realm, right? And suddenly, it’s what you’re doing, and it’s less about what you may have learned and how you’re going to push it forward. I think that changes the stakes. I mean, yeah.

Yeah. I mean the stakes felt incredibly different. With the novel. I was working on my MFA and this one, you know, I was working on my MFA, I was thinking about the hope of getting published, but I was also thinking about literary prizes and stuff like that. And I wrote this book thinking, please God, let me sell this so I can make my rent and also like, go to the dentist. And that’s a very different place to write from. I think some of the writing around being part of the precariat, some of the writing, and like the very intense and intentional focus on material reality, and the character’s material reality came from that place. And I just kind of was like, okay, actually, this is part of my writing project. It’s part of my artistic project. Because this is how ordinary people live, where what’s happening with our landlords, what’s happening with our bosses, what’s happening with our teeth is part of sort of our lives. Not just whether we fall in love.

Well, and shouldn’t art reflect our reality? I mean, if you think about, like, what Steinbeck was doing, right? I mean, he’s the first example that comes to mind for me. But at the same time, like, there’s a lot of interesting stuff to be said about everyday life. And the idea that you’re disguising sort of a big political novel, in a coming of age, is really fun. I mean, it was fun for me as a reader.

But I have a question for you, when you were shifting from the old manuscript, the MFA manuscript. Let’s just call it the MFA manuscript. When you are shifting from that to the new book that ultimately becomes All This Could Be Different, when did you know you had the right new project?

It’s a great question. You know, I think so much about the artistic process, we try to talk about it like engineers and architects, and I think that there are ways in which we are, but there’s also this sort of, like, deep and fundamental level, where we’re sort of mistakes and Oracle’s as well. I think, ultimately, all I knew is I got to like about page 40 and I thought, this has the breath of life. And the other project didn’t. And I was really, I think, in many ways too young and maybe a little bit too cowardly to admit that there was so much that was smart and talented about the other project that it didn’t have that sort of essential aliveness that allows any work of art to go out into the world and meet other people without this sort of like, hovering presence of the person that made it.

Well and also, I think, again, and I know I mentioned this earlier in the show, but the idea that you can find the truth of your own life in the details of someone else’s. I mean that’s why I read fiction. I don’t necessarily need to see people who look just like me or sound just like me or whatever. But it’s nice. It’s just also I would just like a wider variety of voices. And I think for a long time, we had Ruth Ozeki on the show, maybe a year ago…

I love her. I love her work.

She’s amazing. But she and I were talking about reading a lot of Updike and Cheever when we were young, because that was canon. And now to see the canon evolve a little bit is, it’s fun. Everything should evolve, right? Everything should evolve. Not just us, not just our friendships, not just our work lives, or our relationships with work. But the idea that we can evolve in our relationships to art. I kind of like that. I like knowing I can do that.

And I mean, I think that my feeling about it is in general, like the literal title of my book is All This Could Be Different, which is, I think you could read it as like a sort of sorrowing statement, you know, of the present moment, but it’s also a demand for change. Right? A demand for more. And I think about this idea of a demand for more, when it comes to things like the canon as well. And I think there’s a sort of very complicated, but meaningful line to walk where, yes, we, like should and can and have expanded the canon. Let’s continue to do it. But I also think that there can be this co-optation of diversity, a co-optation of representation, completely, after certain point becomes divorced from the radical power questioning roots of this movement and the struggle as well. And it just becomes all about, how can I be reflected in a totally one to one way in my complete specificity in art, that maybe saying something or maybe saying very little. So for me, representations matters, but I think it can also be a trap. And I ultimately kind of come down to this– both, where I’m like, yes, it matters, but also so it is a question of like for whom is power being marshaled with it? And that applies to electoral politics. It also applies to art for me.

Yeah, and I’m right there with you, especially on the art front, because I mean, value gets ascribed in lots of different ways. That’s a whole, that is an entirely separate conversation, which hopefully you and I will get to have at some point, but what’s next for you?

I am working on a new project. I’m hoping for the very best. I’m working on some short form stuff that I’m hoping will come out in the next you know, four months or so. And I’m trying to live a happy and healthy and love filled life.

That sounds pretty great, but also sounds like a really great place for us to end the show. This has been really fun. Thank you so much. Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different is out now. This was really fun.

Well, lovely. Thank you.

Poured Over