Chetna Maroo interview: 'It’s unusual to experience such a clear starting impulse for a story'

How does it feel to be nominated for the Booker Prize 2023, and what would winning the prize mean to you - especially as one of several debut novelists on the longlist? 

It’s feels wonderful. It’s an honour. It’s humbling to see Western Lane amongst all the books that have been longlisted in the history of the prize. I’m still taking that in. 

How long did it take to write Western Lane, and what does your writing process look like? Do you type or write in longhand? Are there multiple drafts or sudden bursts of activity? Is there a significant amount of plotting before you begin writing? 

It took three years. I write slowly, the first pages in longhand, then typing. I usually try to get each sentence and paragraph sounding right before I go on, reading and editing from the beginning of the story. My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way. I have to trust that the work will benefit in the end from the rhythm and slow quality of this attention. 

In the novel we see the world through the eyes of eleven-year-old Gopi. She and her sisters have recently lost their mother. Their pa is bereft and struggling to parent his daughters. At the same time, the girls’ aunt and uncle watch the family, hoping to help Pa by taking one of the girls to raise as their own. As I was writing, I was feeling my way. I didn’t have a plot or outline for the whole novel, but I had a sense that the story would turn on this one question: would Pa bring himself to let one of his daughters go?  

Where do you write? What does your working space look like? 

I write at my desk at home. To my left is a wardrobe, to my right above my desk the exhibition poster from the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Tove Jansson retrospective, showing Moomintroll standing in an open window looking out into the dark.  

Much of the novel concerns what is unsaid. There are pauses, silences, gestures. Conversations are fragmented, or end almost before they’ve begun. What drove you to invest so much editorial energy in this unspoken communication between characters?  

It was natural to write like this once I had felt my way into Gopi’s perspective. This was just the rhythm of life as she experienced it as a child, inside this family dealing with loss.  

Perhaps for Gopi and her sisters the way feelings are unspoken is rooted in something deeper. The sisters have always spoken Gujarati, their mother tongue, but not well enough to converse easily with their own mother, and so when she was alive the girls had learned to read her body and to communicate by being physical in her presence. I had the feeling that spoken language had become a wall for the girls, an obstacle to knowing and being known. 

Which book or books are you reading at the moment? 

I’m reading André Dao’s haunting debut novel Anam. I just read Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch and Michael Magee’s debut Close to Home. They’re terrific. And I was blown away by the stories in Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man and Thomas Morris’ Open Up. 

Do you have a favourite Booker-winning or Booker-shortlisted novel and, if so, why? 

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. And if you’d let me have a Booker-longlisted novel, I’d add My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I don’t know what makes these books endure in my mind, but maybe in part it is the feeling of having genuinely encountered the private world of another person, a sensibility – the narrator’s or the author’s, perhaps both.