The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
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Kiran Desai on The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A last chance to know IndiaThe book accumulated for years before it became a book at all. What began as diaries, notebooks, and ideas followed wherever they led eventually resolved into a recognizable project only when she read back through the pile and found a shape already waiting inside it.
The last twenty years have been spent creating material; it wasn’t that I was thinking of writing this book when I first began. I was keeping diaries, notebooks, following ideas wherever they went. At a certain point, perhaps five or seven years into writing, I read through all of that material and thought that I could make a book out of it, lifting certain themes and beginning to work on Sonia and Sunny.
Her father’s death in 2008 imposed a deadline she had not anticipated. She was already working on the novel when he died, and his absence collapsed the particular kind of access to India that only a parent’s home can provide.
This novel was a particular enterprise because I realised that I would not be able to write about India this way again. My father died in 2008, and I was working on this book at that time. I knew that after he was gone, I would no longer be going home.
The novel’s original premise was love. What expanded it was the recognition that romantic loneliness was only one chamber of a much larger structure, one that could reach across class, race, and national borders without losing its logic.
Not just romantic loneliness, but the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world — all of which can be seen as forms of loneliness.
That expansion also freed the novel’s geography: once loneliness became a structural rather than a personal condition, she could move across Delhi, Allahabad, Vermont, New York, and a Mexican fishing village and still be writing one book.
Writing about love had felt, for a long time, like the wrong ambition for a serious literary novelist. Her previous book, the politically charged ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, was what finally gave her permission to try the harder territory.
If you see yourself as a literary writer, you somehow think you don’t want to go there. But perhaps writing my last book, which was really political, gave me some confidence to go to this other subject that actually seemed harder. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Five thousand pages and a demon paintingShe did not build the novel from a plan. Each character’s story was written in isolation until, late in the process, she could see how the lives might be arranged against each other. The plotting came last, not first.
I wrote the stories of many of my characters separately, including Sonia and Sunny, until I could see how their stories might intersect. I plotted out the novel only at the last stage of writing.
That method of accumulation, one small scrap of reality carried into art and then another, produced a manuscript of staggering length. At a writing residency, she printed it out. The stack was 5,000 pages, and everyone who saw it looked terrified.
She described her working method as that of an earthworm or ant: “taking one crumb of reality, moving it into an artistic realm, taking another, moving it into the artistic realm... building something beyond my vision. For years.” [paraphrased from audio]
A painting by the artist Francesco Clemente, sent to her while she was writing an introduction to his work, redirected the book’s architecture. The small, faceless demon he sent reminded her of tantric figures and gave her a structural question around which to organize the whole.
I secretly structured the book around the question of who is captured by whose gaze — Sunny in his mother’s, Sonia in Ilan’s or in the gaze of a German sculptor. Badal Baba became central to that idea.
The novel she first planned was entirely realistic. The demon Badal Baba and the book’s hallucinatory passages were not in that version. She resisted the supernatural until she concluded the realistic frame simply could not carry the full weight of what she was attempting.
At a certain point — midway through life in my experience — we realise there is really evil, and those children’s stories were right all along.
The demonic, once she admitted it, became what she called the novel’s ‘connective tissue,’ the element that gave its underlying structure its shape across otherwise disparate geographies and timelines.
Writing the intimate scenes proved more exposing than anything political she had written before. Sonia’s relationship with the sculptor Ilan, and the failing marriage of Sonia’s parents, required a kind of vulnerability she had not previously asked of herself.
Exploring the loneliness in intimate relationships is the biggest challenge of all but that’s the place of fiction — to articulate the very intimate places that no one ever gets to see and the challenge of putting that across in an honest way. It feels very revealing.
The personal thread
Vermont in winter, before the book existedSonia’s years as a student in Vermont are not invented from scratch. Before Desai had any sense she would write this novel, she was living the experience she later gave her protagonist: a young woman from India, alone in a New England library, writing her first stories.
I felt both real loneliness — the painful kind of being away from home and alone for the first time — and artistic loneliness, the solace of being able to read and write in that silence, looking out onto a snowy landscape. It felt as exquisite as it was painful.
The novel’s water imagery, which runs from ocean crossings to monsoons to the damp cold of Vermont winters, came from the same autobiographical geography. She thought of loneliness not as a mood but as an element, as pervasive and shapeshifting as water.
I thought of loneliness as being as ubiquitous as water. The book has many ocean and water images. I thought of the different forms loneliness takes: the immigrant’s loneliness, the self-displacement of becoming unknowable.
What she wants us to sit with
Loneliness as the thing that connects usShe is aware the novel is heavy with melancholy. But the experience she wants readers to leave with is its opposite: the recognition that the loneliness of one person rhymes with the loneliness of every other person in the book, and outside it.
It carries a lot of melancholy, but what I hope readers get from it is actually a sense of connection. It’s almost as if loneliness is what keeps people apart, but it’s also the uniting force in this novel. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s politics and its love story are not separate concerns. Sonia’s struggle to be taken seriously as a writer and Sunny’s discomfort explaining the brown world for Western media are both, in her framing, questions about who owns a story and who gets to tell it.
I was thinking more about the different rifts in society, and was interested in who owns the story, who tells the story and who is captured by whose gaze.
The book preserves a version of India organized around secular democracy and a syncretic sense of belonging: the world of her grandparents’ generation in Allahabad, which she watched being undone during the years she wrote. She wants readers to understand that preservation as a political act, not mere sentiment.
There are uses for nostalgia. It is a dirty word but it shouldn’t be, so long as you [also] show the darker sides.
Her final ask of readers is personal as well as political. The epidemic of loneliness she is describing is one many readers are already living, and she wants the book to give them permission to name it rather than manage it.
A lot of readers will understand the global epidemic of loneliness; you shouldn’t be afraid to be personal about it. In the midst of brokenness, a window opens to invention.