Not long after novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss—which won the Booker Prize in 2006—she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly. She knew she wanted to write a “modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic,” one that explored the forces that keep people apart—like class, race, nationality, and family history—as much as those that bring them together. Writing the book, however, took nearly two decades.
One challenge of spending so many years on a single project, Desai says with a laugh, is that people start to worry about you. “They begin to wonder what’s wrong. Are you really working on something?” One neighbor, who noticed how Desai rose early each morning to write, ate breakfast and lunch at her desk, took short breaks for errands or chores, and wrote late into the evening, even tried to intervene. “You need to come out of your house,” he told her. “You’ll go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!” Her 90-year-old uncle affectionately observed that she was starting to look “like a kind of derelict,” which she admits was true. “It was becoming absurd!” Yet Desai says she loved living this way, completely devoted to her writing.
At times, she seems puzzled by why the book took so long. It runs almost 700 pages, “but then I also have to remember there are authors who write books this long several times over. Look at Hilary Mantel or Dickens or Tolstoy.” She wonders if perhaps she was “just writing this book over and over, letting it take different forms.” By around 2013, her notes had grown to 5,000 pages, and she struggled to decide which threads to pull out and weave into the story. How far back in time should she go? How far forward? How much should she expand from Sonia and Sunny to explore the lives of their friends and relatives?
“This feels like the big book of my life,” she says. “I don’t have time to do it again.”
Even when these questions felt impossible to answer, she kept working. “It was just a stubbornness that I can’t explain,” she says. “I become very determined and very stubborn—and not very nice—if I’m kept away from my writing.” She feels “lucky” that she was able to work with such intensity, since she doesn’t have to balance writing with children or family life. In the year or two after winning the Booker, she felt some pressure, but over time “that self-consciousness fell away,” and she was “just living in a very isolated way and working.” She calls her mother daily and visits her often in upstate New York, and she saw friends a few times a week. But for decades, mostly, she wrote alone at home in New York or during long trips to Mexico.
“There have been times in my life when I’ve been very, very solitary,” she says. So solitary that her social identity seemed to fade. “I didn’t think of myself as a person, particularly. I didn’t think of myself as being from somewhere. I didn’t think of myself as a woman, especially, because I was so alone—what does it mean, without context?”
We meet at her home on a quiet street in Queens, where she moves daily from her kitchen table to an upstairs desk to catch the best light. Copies of the UK edition of her book have just been delivered and remain in a box by the front door. Even now, she finds herself thinking, “I really could have done it this way, if I had just taken that out and put it somewhere else…”
Desai was 35 when she won the Booker—at the time, the youngest woman to do so—and now she is 54. She is slim, elegantly dressed in a pale pink linen tunic and dark pink trousers, with a grey streak running through her hair.She brushes her hair and speaks with a gentle, precise manner. Finishing the book felt “anticlimactic,” she says, “because it’s ordinary life now, after living in a completely artistic world.” She isn’t quite sure what to do with herself next.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, like her previous novel, is an epic, multi-layered family saga with dark humor that tackles major political and philosophical themes. The story centers on Sonia and Sunny, both Indian writers who moved to the U.S. as students. Their paths first cross when Sonia’s family sends Sunny a marriage proposal, which goes nowhere—Sunny is dating an American woman and has no interest in traditional customs. Meanwhile, Sonia is captivated by Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a needy, abusive, and much older artist.
Many of the “loving” relationships in the novel—whether romantic or familial—are destructive, unbalanced, and suffocating. Characters turn to art as both a comfort and an escape from their difficult lives, yet art also becomes another form of exploitation. Ilan, for instance, is a thief and a parasite who profits from others’ suffering, while giving himself entirely to his art. He tells Sonia, “If you are a good artist… you give more of your life to art, you begin to subtract your life so it becomes such an emptiness that you dare not look upon it.” When asked if she ever feels that way herself, Desai replies, “I do feel that I made that exchange. I don’t regret it, but… it did displace my life. Or maybe I just filled it up.”
Desai says she has always “lived in her head,” but growing up in Delhi as the youngest of four siblings, she was never alone. Her father worked for an oil company, and her mother was expected to support him, which meant dressing in a beautiful silk sari each evening to host or attend parties. Desai admires her mother’s resourcefulness—how she still found time and confidence to write and filled their bookshelves with hard-to-find books. Anita Desai was nominated for the Booker Prize three times, but her children only understood her fame “sort of backwards,” when her glamorous foreign-language translators began visiting. “It opened up the door to the world, and eventually she stepped through it and left, and took me with her,” Desai says. As a teenager, when her mother received a fellowship at Cambridge, Desai—the only child still at home—accompanied her to the UK.
“It was scary to me, because I had never left India,” Desai recalls. She found the vast power divide between the two nations “startling,” something her extensive reading of British children’s classics hadn’t prepared her for. “I could not put it together with Paddington Bear and The Wind in the Willows and all kinds of other books I read early on that were so strange,” she says. Ultimately, it was V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival that best helped her understand her immigrant experience.
A year after moving to Cambridge, she and her mother emigrated to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Desai enrolled in a U.S. high school. “I have to say that in comparison to India, the American system of education seemed so unbelievably easy—you just got smiley faces and encouragement,” she jokes.
She later attended Bennington, a liberal arts college in Vermont, where she took her first creative writing class. “I remember just being so happy with the first story I wrote,” she says. It was called Hair Oil, about a man obsessed with his hair; the next was about a snooty civil servant sent to rural India. “Very odd,” she says, laughing. “I don’t know why I was writing those stories.”She also began working on her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which was published in 1998. It is a satire about a young man who moves into a guava tree and is mistaken for a holy man.
Soon after, Desai earned an MFA from Columbia University in New York. She found that one drawback of studying creative writing is that having your work regularly read by a group “makes you very, very self-conscious—and you need to lose that to write well.” Afterward, she avoided writers’ groups and wrote The Inheritance of Loss the “old-fashioned way,” alone, over seven years. Her mother is always her first reader because she instinctively understands what her daughter is trying to accomplish. “She knows the landscape I’m working from, so she understands what I am trying to do, even though it’s not yet on the page,” Desai says.
In Desai’s new novel, a character named Sonia is working on a story that sounds much like Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. She shows it to Ilan, who tells her to stop writing “orientalist nonsense” and to avoid magical realism or topics like arranged marriages. “He’s saying something a lot of people say, and it’s a legitimate point,” Desai explains. Like Sonia, she has struggled with how India should be portrayed for a Western audience. Ultimately, she includes several arranged marriage storylines and elements of magical realism in the novel.
As Sonia learns, there are no easy answers. In the novel, Sonia changes one of her stories so a character eats an apple instead of a guava, making it seem less “exotic” to Western readers—but also less authentic, since apples are more expensive and less common in India. “Most marriages in India are arranged; that’s the truth. But should you avoid writing about it because of the audience it will be sold to? I think a lot of it comes down to whether you’re a good or a bad writer.”
Desai has lived in New York for over 25 years, but until her father’s death in 2008, she visited India annually. Now that the family home has been sold (her parents separated after she and her mother moved to the U.S.), she visits less often. She felt this novel might be her last chance to write about India, capturing the country around the turn of the millennium when Hindu nationalism was rising and dinner party conversations began to shift in ways that alarmed her. “You’d be in the living room with friends and suddenly something else was acceptable,” she recalls. During a visit last winter, she was struck by the fear expressed by friends from religious minorities. “I learned that when fear enters a nation, it’s almost the end. I never thought it would happen in the United States as well,” she says, noting similar fear in her multicultural neighborhood of Jackson Heights. “Under the subway tracks, before Trump was elected, it was very lively. People sold arepas, tacos, skewers of food, religious charms, bread—and yes, many women soliciting prostitution. But now many of those businesses have been shut down. People are very scared because of immigration raids.”
Desai loves living in this diverse community, at a comfortable distance from the New York literary scene. She lives next to families from Ireland and Tibet, and until his recent death, she often visited her elderly Egyptian neighbor to drink coffee under his fig tree and listen to stories of his upbringing in Alexandria—”so I wasn’t entirely solitary,” she admits. We take a walk along a row of South American…We pass by African restaurants, grocery stores, phone shops, and money exchanges until she suddenly stops, delighted, and says, “Can you smell that? Curry!” In just one block, the street’s atmosphere shifts completely from South American to the Indian subcontinent. She points out the best kebab spots, and we pause to admire lavish, gem-studded, 24-carat gold wedding jewelry. A man hands us business cards for a “World Famous Indian Astrologer,” and Desai notices with amusement that, along with promises to reunite lovers and secure promotions, he claims to solve the vague issue of “kids mistake” (sic). She shows me the tucked-away Tibetan dumpling shop that Sunny visits in the book, as well as the bank he frequents.
At 4:30 p.m., her mother calls, as is their daily ritual. Anita Desai is 88 and has had a few recent falls. As the sibling who lives closest and is her first point of contact, Desai was very worried about leaving her mother to go on book tours. She unintentionally added to her own anxiety by reading several novels set in nursing homes, including Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again—the latter recommended by her mother, who said, “You should read this, it’s terrifying!” Despite this, her mother, who is “thrilled” that Desai’s novel is finished, has been encouraging her not to hold back on any travel plans.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has already been longlisted for the Booker Prize, which Desai sees as remarkable recognition. “I feel relieved, as if I’ve averted some vague disaster, and very lucky,” she says. She isn’t yet ready to start a new project but already knows that whatever comes next can’t be quite as ambitious in scope. “I could never do it again—it wouldn’t be strategically smart,” she admits. “This feels like the big book of my life in that way. I don’t have time to do it again.”
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai will be published by Hamish Hamilton on September 25. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about Kiran Desais quote I never expected this to occur in the US
General Beginner Questions
Q1 Who is Kiran Desai
A Kiran Desai is an acclaimed Indian author who won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance of Loss
Q2 What is the quote I never expected this to occur in the US referring to
A She made this statement in response to the enthusiastic and widespread critical acclaim her novel received in the United States which she did not anticipate
Q3 When and where did she say this
A She made this comment during interviews and public appearances following her Booker Prize win in 2006
Q4 Why was she so surprised by the US reaction
A The novel is largely set in India and Nepal and deals with very specific postcolonial and immigrant experiences She may have expected it to resonate more with audiences in those regions than with a broad American readership
Advanced Deeper Questions
Q5 What does her surprise say about perceptions of the American literary market
A It highlights a common assumption that American readers might primarily gravitate toward American stories or that complex internationallyfocused narratives might be niche Her success challenged that idea
Q6 How did the US reception differ from others like in the UK or India
A While the book was celebrated globally the quote specifically points to the overwhelming and perhaps unexpected scale of admiration from American critics literary circles and readers
Q7 Is the novels theme part of why the US reception was surprising
A Yes The book critically examines themes like immigration cultural displacement and the legacy of colonialismtopics that are deeply personal and sometimes uncomfortable which can be a hard sell Its success showed a American appetite for such challenging global perspectives
Q8 Did this quote change how international authors view the US audience
A It likely encouraged many international writers demonstrating that American readers are open to and eager for powerful stories from anywhere in the world not just domestic narratives
Practical Reflective Questions
Q9 What can aspiring writers learn from this quote
