Interpreter of Maladies: Stories
by Jhumpa Lahiri

List Price: $23.00
Pages: 160
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0618101365
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and grew up in Rhode Island. She has traveled several times to India, where both her parents were born and raised, and where a number of her stories are set. Lahiri received her B.A. from Barnard College; and from Boston University she has received an M.A. in English, and M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design and has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Lahiri’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Agni, Epoch, The Louisville Review, Harvard Review, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the O. Henry Award, a Transatlantic Review award from the Henfield Foundation in 1993, and a fiction prize from The Louisville Review in 1997. She was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was named one of the "20 best young fiction writers in America" in The New Yorker’s summer 1999 fiction issue.

Jhumpa Lahiri lives in New York City, where she is working on a novel, to be published by Houghton Mifflin.

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What inspired the book’s title? The title came to me long before the book did, or, for that matter, the story to which it refers. In 1991, during my first year as a graduate student at Boston University, I bumped intoan acquaintance of mine. I barely knew him, but the year before, he had very kindly helped me move ... to a one-bedroom apartment. When I asked him what he was doing with himself, he said he was working at a doctor’s office, interpreting for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients who had difficulty explaining their ailments in English. As I walked away from that brief conversation, I thought continuously about what a unique position it was, and by the time I'd reached my house, the phrase "interpreter of maladies" was planted in my head. I told myself, one day I'll write a story with that title. Every now and then I struggled to find a story to suit the title. Nothing came to me. About five years passed. Then one day I jotted down a paragraph containing the bare bones of "Interpreter of Maladies" in my notebook. When I was putting the collection together, I knew from the beginning that this had to be the title story, because it best expresses, thematically, the predicament at the heart of the book—the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves. In some senses I view my position as a writer, in so far as I attempt to articulate these emotions, as a sort of interpreter as well. Some of your settings are in India, others in the United States? Why this combination? When I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts, for some reason, were always set in Calcutta, which is a city I know quite well from repeated visits with my family. These trips to a vast, unruly, fascinating city so different from the small New England town where I was raised shaped my perceptions of the world and of people from a very early age. I learned that there was another side, a vastly different version to everything. I learned to observe things as an outsider, and yet I also knew that as different as Calcutta is from Rhode Island, I belonged there in some fundamental way, in the ways I didn't seem to belong in the United States. As I gained a bit more confidence, I began to set stories in the United States and wrote about situations closer to my own experiences. For me, that has been the greater challenge. What distinguishes the experiences of Indian immigrants to the United States from those of their American-born children? In a sense, very little. The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children. The older I get, the more aware am I that I have somehow inherited a sense of exile from my parents, even though in many ways—superficial ones, largely—I am so much more American than they are. In fact, it is still very hard to think of myself as an American. For immigrants, the challenges of exile, the loneliness, the constant sense of alienation, the knowledge of and longing for a lost world, are more explicit and distressing than for their children. On the other hand, the problem for the children of immigrants, those with strong ties to their country of origin, is that they feel neither one thing nor the other. The feeling that there was no single place to which I fully belonged bothered me growing up. It bothers me less now. When did you begin writing? I was seven. Although I now associate being a writer with solitude, as a child writing formed the basis of my friendships. My closest friend in elementary school and I used to co-author stories during recess. We thought them aloud, sentence by sentence. We set an example, and sometimes we had a group going, as many as four or five people, all working on a "book." I always hoped for rainy days, so I could stay inside and write instead of having to run around the playground. We were terribly prolific, until high school, when the traumas of adolescence took over. I wrote for the school newspaper, but I stopped writing fiction. In college I took a few workshops, but I had no confidence in myself as a fiction writer, and by the time I graduated, I had decided to be an academic. I applied to graduate English programs and was rejected from all of them. Now I know this was a blessing in disguise. I decided to apply again, but meanwhile I got a job as a research assistant at a nonprofit institution in Cambridge. For the first time I had a computer of my own at my desk, and I started writing fiction again, more seriously. Eventually I had enough material to apply to the creative writing program at Boston University. But once that ended, unsure of what to do next, I went on to graduate school and got my Ph.D. In the process, it became clear to me that I was not meant to be a scholar. I still wrote stories on the side, publishing things here and there. The year I finished my dissertation, I was also accepted to the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and that changed everything. It was something of a miracle. In seven months I got an agent, sold a book, and had a story published in The New Yorker. I've been extremely lucky. It's been the happiest possible ending.




© Copyright 2009 by Jhumpa Lahiri. Reprinted with permission by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.

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