Review: How I Write by Sonia Faleiro

It is a risky business, this genre of literary self-exegesis. Writers, notorious for their evasions, do not always make the best explicators of their own art. Sonia Faleiro’s new book How I Write attempts to extract this very clarity from this haze of the creative process. The book is a series of interviews with South Asian writers who, according to Falerio, in their respective ways, are grappling with the business of storytelling in a world increasingly hostile to truth.

The interview is a strange animal. One might call it a kind of cultural taxidermy which holds writers at their most self-conscious and pins them to a board so we may examine their method, their motivations.

This book is made of conversations, but it is also a book about the stakes of literature. Can an interview be literature? If, as Fredric Jameson once said, the interview genre promotes “bad habits of thought,” and leads the mind into a spiral of commodified sound bites, Faleiro’s book tries really hard to resist this fate. The interviews interrogate what it means to write from the margins, to shape narrative under regimes of suppression, to write fiction and non-fiction in an era where the line between the two is growing ever more blurred.

If there is a pattern to be found in these interviews, it is the creeping presence of journalism. The aestheticized detachment of fiction, the sacred autonomy of the literary, seems to have been subsumed by the urgent, moralizing instincts of reportage. And yet, one must ask, does this journalistic impulse dilute fiction? Does it strip away fiction’s ability to be elusive, to be frivolous, to not always be on the side of righteousness? Roland Barthes, that assassin of authors, would have sighed at the insistent presence of intention here. When writing becomes so entangled in advocacy, does it still remain literature?

The book opens with Pankaj Mishra, the ever-watchful critic of empire, says that he “never really departed from the fundamental way of looking at journalism while approaching his subjects of writing.” The idea that literature must remain tethered to a moral clarity, that writers must stand “in solidarity with the underdog,” pervades many of these interviews. VV Ganeshananthan, reflecting on narratives of Sri Lankan violence, points to the habitual erasure of lived experience in Western reportage: “A lot of writing about Sri Lanka... would be a picture of an unnamed person suffering. And I would think, ‘That person has a name.’” There is a simple but urgent reminder: fiction may be constructed, but the realities it describes are anything but.

But How I Write is not merely about the politics of literature, it also tries to excavate the craft. Mayukh Sen talks about the hazards of navigating an industry that sees his identity before it sees his work, while Kamila Shamsie has a surprisingly pragmatic stance on criticism: “If I’m angry... I need to really stop and think. Either I am confident in the work I’ve done, or there’s something that needs to be fixed.” There is an undeniable pleasure in these moments of artistic honesty. Craft is discussed less as a divine revelation but more as a series of negotiations.

There is a certain safety in speaking about process rather than product, about the conditions of creation rather than the risks of content. While How I Write foregrounds writers as intellectuals, it does not always push them into the uncomfortable spaces where their ideas might be tested. The book talks about the tension between artistic ambition and institutional power but it rarely interrogates these contradictions outright.

The best moments come when the mask slips.

Take Mansi Choksi, whose 2022 book on love and rebellion in India was, by all accounts, well-received. But she fixates on one absence: The New York Times review that never came.

“Publishing a book is like birthing a child, and the period after is like postpartum anxiety where you think, ‘What is going to happen to this? Is it getting what it needs?’ After The Times review didn’t come out, I went into sixth gear and emailed every book influencer with two followers saying, ‘Can you please feature this?’ It was a humiliating, dehumanizing experience.”

Here was finally something raw. It revealed how ruthless is the industry’s gate keeping, and how fragile is the ecosystem of literary self-worth. To write is one thing. To be read, another. But to be validated in the right places, in the right ways, this is the quiet desperation behind so much literary ambition.

Nilanjana Roy, the mystic, takes a different approach. “I think there’s reason for every book that you write, and that reason goes beyond merely wanting to be an author. There’s a reason why the book you’re writing came to you. Many cultures believe that tales find their tellers. Girish Karnad, the late playwright and novelist, one of India’s greatest writers, and the American novelist Elizabeth Gilbert both believe that something mysterious happens, that a story chooses you. Don’t be afraid if a piece of writing, even one to which you’ve given much time and attention and care, dies midway. Maybe you can revive it, but if you can’t, it’s okay. Perhaps it taught you a few things about writing, but it wasn’t your story. But it is a milestone when you find your story, whether your book is serious or light-hearted. when it’s truly yours.”

It’s a beautiful thought, but also a strangely fatalistic one. Does a story choose its writer, or does the writer choose the story, wrestle it into shape, insist on its urgency? How I Write then also puts a writer’s agency under the microscope. What drives a writer? Inspiration or the necessity to say something at a time when speech is under threat?

In her introduction, Faleiro situates this book within the larger mission of South Asia Speaks, which is an initiative designed to support emerging South Asian writers in a climate where freedom of expression is increasingly under siege. The book promises to be a masterclass. The term masterclass has a promise of revelation. The revelations here, however, are not pedagogical in the traditional sense. They are also not didactic per se, instead they show glimpses into the battle scars of writing.

And what about the book’s implicit thesis? That these voices, linked by geography if not always by sensibility, will give us a consolidated picture of South Asian literature? Here, too, the book has a certain instability. Many of these writers like Shamsie and Thapa write from a distance. Manjushree Thapa admits as much: “Writing from a distance has been very confusing for me. I’ve still not got my head around it.” If distance alters the conditions of writing, does it also alter the truths that are told?

How does one write for an audience that is always slightly out of frame? South Asian writers, particularly those in English, often find themselves translating their world, not just linguistically but culturally. There is a fatigue to this, a frustration. As Shamsie puts it, “I want to collapse the distance between what we do and what we don’t have the freedom to do.”

The dislocated writer is not a new archetype. Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Anita Desai have all written from elsewhere. But here, the tension is more than personal. It is political. The home they write about is surveilled, censorious, and often inhospitable to dissenting voices. Writing from exile becomes less an aesthetic choice and more a necessity of survival.

But then there is the question of audience. Mishra talks about finding receptive audiences outside South Asia who might cut back against autocrats’ digital fortresses. But if literature is a form of resistance, what happens when the resistance is performed primarily for foreign eyes?

Suketu Mehta in his interview recounts the story of Anna Akhmatova standing in a prison queue during Stalin’s purges. A woman recognizes her and whispers, “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova simply nods and says “Yes I can”. “The shadow of a smile passed over the ghost of her face,” Akhmatova writes. That’s all the woman wanted to know. Literature, at its best, is the description of the unspeakable, the resolution of reality into something we can metabolize. But what happens when writers turn that lens inward, when they describe the act of describing? Sonia Faleiro’s How I Write aims to answer that but does it succeed?

Despite everything, this book feels necessary. It reminds us why writing still matters. It does not fully resolve the paradox at its heart: that writing is at once an act of radical intervention and, increasingly, a performance of palatability. The act of interrogation is not always sufficient, sometimes, what is needed is a rupture. The revolution remains, for the most part, offstage.

Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.