Today, I am honoured to welcome to my blog, the author of “The Story Hour”, Ms. Thrity Umrigar who has a considerable amount of heart-stirring literary fiction under her belt thus far along in her writing career! There was one in particular I still remember finding through my local library: The World We Found. Imagine my happy surprise to not only take part in her blog tour for her newest release, but having the happenstance opportunity to have a conversation with her about her writing life, approach to the craft of creating stories, and of course, bobbles of insight into The Story Hour; the novel of the hour!
Without further adieu, please enjoy where our conversation led us!
Book Synopsis:
From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The World We Found and The Space Between Uscomes a profound, heartbreakingly honest novel about friendship, love, and second chances.
An experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she agrees to treat a young Indian woman who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Cut off from her family in India, and trapped in a loveless marriage to a domineering man who limits her world to their small restaurant and grocery store, Lakshmi is desperately lonely.
Moved by Lakshmi’s plight, Maggie offers to see her as an outpatient for free. In the course of their first sessions in Maggie’s home office, she quickly realizes that what Lakshmi really needs is not a shrink but a friend. Determined to empower Lakshmi as a woman who feels valued in her own right, Maggie abandons protocol, and soon doctor and patient become close. Even though they seemingly have nothing in common, both women are haunted by loss and truths that they are afraid to reveal.
However, crossing professional boundaries has its price. As Maggie and Lakshmi’s relationship deepens, long-buried secrets come to light that shake their faith in each other and force them to confront painful choices in their own lives.
With Thrity Umrigar’s remarkable sensitivity and singular gift for an absorbing narrative,The Story Hour explores the bonds of friendship and the margins of forgiveness.
Author Biography:
Thrity Umrigar is the author of five other novels—The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time—and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. An award-winning journalist, she has been a contributor to the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard, the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Seth Rosenberg Prize. A professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
When asked about your WIP during your BookSlut Interview you mentioned you were writing “I Begins” which is the very first words of the novel “The Story Hour”. Did you already know the title of the finished version at that point in time OR was it truly the first opening sentence that had already formed?
Umrigar responds: I knew that I Begins would be the first and last lines of the new novel and since it’s the story of a woman’s transformation, I thought it was an apt title for the novel. However, I was also aware that given that it was ungrammatical, the title would confuse readers. I knew I would ultimately have to change it but it was a good working title for me.
You take a sociological perspective whilst carving out the interior lives of your characters, focusing on their particular internal struggles and illuminating their common threads of hope influenced by their actions and choices. Does this come inherently through your own penchant for living through hope whilst embracing cultural differences? Or in combination for a passion for understanding the kinetic struggles of humanity on a whole?
Umrigar responds: I agree with the playwright Tony Kushner when he says that hope is not a choice, it is a moral obligation. I believe positive change is always possible and even if that ultimately proves to not be the case, it makes for a better, richer life if we believe that change is possible rather than start with the assumption that it isn’t. As a writer, I don’t necessary tie up loose ends in a pretty little bow at the end of my novels, but I always like my open-ended endings to allow the reader to at least entertain the possibility of transformation. Without hope, this would be a dead planet.
“The Story Hour” is a testament of crossing boundaries and barriers between patients and their psychologists, a thinly veiled line by most regards, as how close is too close and how detached can you become whilst engaged in therapy? It is a curious quandary to explore, and I was curious if this particular story was centered on a real-life story you’ve overheard (as some of your stories are) or if perhaps it was a thread of your own curiosity to explore?
Umrigar responds: There were two things I was thinking about when I wrote The Story Hour, and in some ways, they may seem like contradictory impulses or assumptions. One was that therapy is primarily a white, middle-class concept, one that is alien to people in many cultures–in the Third World most certainly, where talking about your problems may seem not only indulgent but also futile because poverty, illiteracy etc. are not going to be cured by talking about them. But it is also true in subcultures within Western society–immigrant communities, blue-collar and working class communities.
But at the same time, I was intrigued by the thought that “therapy” was simply a form of storytelling–that is, you are telling the story of your life to another person. By doing so, you are shaping a narrative of your life and this act itself can lead to personal growth and transformation. And that’s why it’s called The Story Hour–that hour a week that Lakshmi and Maggie spend in therapy together is when Lakshmi is allowed to “speak her truth,” tell her own story. It gives her permission, you see, to create her own persona. And then she becomes it.
I was raised by parents who always believe in cultivating experiences, whilst maintaining an open mind towards where your path can bring you. A mindfulness of being aware of where your led and where your needing to walk is a part of all of our lives, but I gather the sense that you like to explore through your characters the prospect of how our paths are determined and how the whole of who we are as humans can lead us into where we alight. How much of your own experiences do you draw a breath of inspiration vs how much do you imagine plausible to explore through your creativity end up on the page?
Umrigar responds: In a large sense, all fiction is autobiographical in that every word on the page is processed through the prism of a singular life. But fiction is also an imaginative act, which is why I find it so liberating. So while I do mine my own life for transferable literary moments, much of the stuff I simply make up. And sometimes the lines get so blurred that I’m not even sure where the line is.
I concurred with your sentiments that the most wondrous joy of being a writer is nestled inside one’s story, concurrently writing the core of its heart and being in-tune with the nexus of the novel’s synergy. How do you cultivate your writing space to reflect your mind’s will to focus and step through the portal?
Umrigar responds: One of the many gifts that my years in journalism have bestowed upon me is that I can pretty much write in any place or situation–coffee shops, work, my home office, parks, airports, airplanes. I can block out the noise and distractions around me and enter deeply into the fictional world that I am building. I would love to experience the joy of writing in beautiful places–a beach house, on an island, at a writer’s colony–but having a day job and other family obligations has not made such travel possible. I envy my friends who have this luxury and I hope that I can experience it at some point, but for now I write wherever I can. No Excuses. That’s my tough love approach to writing. *:) happy
I love your approach to knit into your stories the common threads that unite us through our humanity and strive to pen stories that are not only universal but can be felt by our hearts. To emotionally connect your characters into our own souls, and let us walk away with an experience that felt intrinsically whole. Do you ever find any particular character to be difficult to conceive that might perhaps push you outside your own comfort zone to write? Or to tackle a thematic that is more of a challenge to convey through your narrative?
Umrigar responds: Yes. Lakshmi’s character in The Story Hour really pushed me out of my comfort zone. I tried writing her in standard English–easier for me to write and my readers to read–but she insisted in talking to me in her broken, idiosyncratic English. Her entire life was alien to me–she grew up in a village in a peasant family, she had an arranged marriage, she had a pet elephant, for Pete’s sake! I didn’t know her well. And so I did what you do when you want to get to know a person better–I spent lots of time with her. But Lakshmi kicked my youknowwhat.
“The Story Hour” I would consider written in a lyrical flow of narrative voice, as your characters speak and act individualistically unique; inherent to their own truth. Did this flow naturally whilst you conceived of them originally or how do you find the ways in which to make each character distinctive from one another? How do you know what to add-in to their dialogue of spoken voice to create a diversity of origin?
Umrigar responds: Well, Maggie and Lakshmi are very different people–one is highly educated, the other semi-literate; one grew up in Brooklyn, the other in an Indian village; Maggie married for love, Lakshmi is trapped in an arranged marriage. So it’s natural that they would speak differently and act differently, which they do. As I said earlier, I had to wait for Lakshmi’s voice, wait until I could hear her. Maggie was easier. She was like a lot of people I know.
As you are drawn into character driven stories, how do you infuse the place and setting of your stories without taking away from the focus on the character? What are your favourite ways to showcase locale and time?
Umrigar responds: I’m not a writer who spends pages and pages on physical description of place. I like to briefly describe the setting and then let the reader see it through the eyes of the character and through dialogue. Place emerges in the context of the character’s life.
What do you feel is the best gift of being a writer who lives and writes intuitively whilst embracing the joy of gathering experiences and adventures? How does writing enliven your own heart and spirit?
Umrigar responds: Writing to me is as essential as breathing. I know that sounds dramatic. But I am a nicer person when I’m working on a project. When I stay away from writing for too long, I feel crabby and unwell. When I’m writing I feel alert, focused, more like my truest self. When the writing is going well, it is an indescribable joy. THere is nothing I would rather do at that time than write.
As your preference for writing stand-alone novels which may or may not have a conceptionalised ending, how do you evoke a sense of completion for the reader without falling into the murkiness of not giving the reader enough of an ending to feel satisfied?
Umrigar responds: This is always a battle and I’m not sure that I’ve won them all. There are readers who appreciate open-ended novels–I’m one of them, because it allows my imagination to work in an active way. There are others who prefer to know what transpires. They write to me or come up to me at readings, demanding an answer. I always joke with them that if I’d wanted them to know, I would’ve written an extra chapter. That this is their opportunity to shape the novel in their own way. This way, they can actively participate in the process. But the funniest interactions are those in which readers tell me what exactly I should do to end the novel in a specific way.
There is a beautiful circle between writers and readers, as writers start the genesis of a story to take life and shape on the written page and readers complete it as they walk through the narrative – sensing and perceiving what is left behind to be found as they read the story through the eyes of the characters. What have you observed through this circle that unites you the most to the fluidity of how tangible stories become once they are set free?
Umrigar responds: This is an excellent question and one that I think I have answered partially in my answer above. I feel that a novel is a song or a dance that requires two partners – the writer and the reader. A novel that has no readers is still a novel but it is not complete until the reader appears. When people demand to know what happens to certain characters after the novel ends, I always ask them what they imagine has happened. And often, their answers are better than anything I could have provided them with. This is my core belief – that after a novel is published, it no longer belongs just to me. It now belongs to thousands of people because every time we read something, we make it ours. We shape it in our own way, we read it through the prism of our own life experience. Even the voice that we read it in is different from the next person’s. Have you ever experienced two people reading the same passage? They will pause in different places, they will stress different words, it will sound completely different. Even when readers imagine a character, they don’t see him or her in the same way. They read dialogue in their heads in different voices. So, in effect, they are not reading the same book, or at least, not exactly the same book. And that is why, a book is a partnership and the writer is just one part of it.
Outside the sphere of writing and research, where do you find your serenity? What lifts your spirit the most when you are not creating?
Umrigar responds: Music. Reading other people’s novels. Long walks. Nature. The ocean. Sharing a glass of wine and food with good friends and great conversation. Hanging out with other writers. And never taking all of these life’s blessings for granted, always knowing that these seemingly everyday things are a raw privilege that many people in the world never get to experience.
Author Connections:
Official Author Websites: Site | @ThrityUmrigar | Facebook
Converse via: #ThirtyUmrigar
I would like to thank Ms. Umrigar on conversing with me on the breadth of her collective works as a writer as much as impartng keen insight into The Story Hour, which is her current release! In preparation for this interview, I had the most delightful time going through all of her past interviews either through print resources and/or video conferences I found on YouTube! I even found a podcast on Blog Talk Radio, therefore I encourage you to seek out her previous conversations if you found a sparked interest in knowing more about Thrity Umrigar after having read this interview! She truly has a lot of multimedia connections online for you to browse through! Lateron today, I will be sharing my ruminations on having read The Story Hour – stay tuned!
Likewise, late last night, it came to my attention to announce the following news in conjunction with the blog tour on behalf of The Story Hour:
The publisher shared some exciting news about THE STORY HOUR that you may want to share with your readers. This weekend, The Boston Globe hailed it as a “a taut, suspenseful page-turner” with the capacity to leave readers “heart-struck” (access the full review here) and NPR’s Weekend Edition host Scott Simon interviewed Thrity about the unusual and captivating relationship between psychologist Maggie and patient Lakshmi (listen to the podcast here). -quoted from a note Ms. Trish sent me via TLC Book Tours; the Tour Director for this novel
This blog tour stop was courtesy of TLC Book Tours:
click-through to follow the blogosphere tour.
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Similar to blog tours, when I feature a showcase for an author via a Guest Post, Q&A, Interview, etc., I do not receive compensation for featuring supplemental content on my blog.
Reader Interactive Question:
What are your own thoughts about the connection between the books we read, the authors who pen them, and the unique bridge of connective thoughts which unite all of us together!?
{SOURCES: Cover art of “The Story Hour”, author photograph, book synopsis and the tour badge were all provided by TLC Book Tours and used with permission. Author Interview badge provided by Parajunkee to give book bloggers definition on their blogs. Bookish Events badge created by Jorie in Canva. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2014.
Wonderful interview.
I finished THE STORY HOUR a few days ago. Absolutely wonderful.
Thanks for your terrific post. Lovely blog too.
Elizabeth
Silver’s Reviews
http://silversolara.blogspot.com