Spring 2000: Bharati Mukherjee

Quotations:

"[I usually write] three total drafts. As I write, I don’t look at the earlier draft. It’s a very weird and wasteful way of proceeding, I suppose, but for me a draft is simply to find out what is the story I really want to tell, whose story is it that I want to tell. Sometimes the character I thought was the main character will get thrown out and put in file boxes and basements of houses in Iowa or Saratoga, and a very minor character will take over."

"I’d say that rewriting is not cosmetic for me, but it’s thinking through each novel. I find it very claustrophobic to actually look at the last draft. [Each draft is] completely new."

"The act of writing is a cosmogenic and a sacred act in Hindu Bengali families like mine. There is a special day, the day dedicated to Goddess Saraswati, who was the goddess of learning, and for whom I am named, Parathi being another variant of that same name."

"An adult takes your hand, guides your hand, and you write the first letter of the alphabet that you have ever written. But my mother, who got married at sixteen and a half and was not allowed to go out of the house, had guerrilla tactics, and was a literacy enthusiast who taught me to read from a very young age."

"I used to find little corners in this crowded household of forty-five to fifty relatives, hangers on, and so on, and devour everything. That excitement in reading is very hard to recapture. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that control, that mastery over the world, as words become clear."

https://youtu.be/LTGiQFGaVTM