Earlier this month, we spoke with Kiran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel that took her two decades to write and at one point spanned 5,000 pages in drafts, until she began to focus on her subject — global loneliness — through the lens of an unresolved romance. It’s one of the best novels in modern memory, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (which she won for her last novel, The Inheritance of Loss), and is one of those rare novels that seems instantly to belong among the classics. That’s why we were so eagerly anticipating our conversation with Desai, and why we’re excited to bring you an edited transcript.
We talked to Desai about why she wanted to take on the phenomenon of “global loneliness,” how loneliness is both a gift to the artist and the curse many of her characters are trying to escape, the difference between emigrating today and staying in daily phone touch with the old country versus emigrating a generation ago and being cut adrift, why if you don’t have love, you don’t properly exist; and if you don’t properly exist, you don’t have love, and how she deals with “WhatsApp uncles” telling her — yes, even now — that she can use ChatGPT to improve her writing.
Below, for our supporting subscribers, we present a full transcript, lightly edited for clarity, of our conversation.
I want to start with this concept of loneliness. It’s in the title and obviously threads throughout the book in so many different ways. And I wanted to talk about that 20 years. Was this a book about loneliness at the origin point of that 20 years? Or did loneliness emerge as you saw what you had done? And as the back half of that, I wonder if you could talk about when you say loneliness, what I perceive to be the different varietals of loneliness that you are confronting in India and the United States in particular, because you kind of frame these two different societies, profoundly different, as both engendering forms of loneliness, but they feel like different kinds of loneliness sometimes, even though they land us in the same place.
Yes. So, lovely question and perfect place to begin. It was always at the heart of this novel. It was absolutely at the origin. I wanted to write a book about global loneliness. The idea of seeing loneliness through the lens of a long, unresolved romance came later.
So I was interested in talking about global loneliness and how it changes form, shifts shape between say, Western ideas of individuality, Eastern ideas of spirituality, all of these different versions of solitude, being alone, some of them are extremely painful, and others sought out loneliness.
Loneliness really is sort of sustenance, as the peace that comes after war, as the essential component of a time of transformation, an essential component of the vocabulary of migration, immigration, translation, multiple perspectives. So, yes, to think of loneliness, therefore, as being as sort of capricious and elemental as water and to just follow it in a global world across different time periods and different geographies.
