Jhumpa Lahiri: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It’s hard to block out all the other information because you recognize names, publishing houses, where they put it on the table; but still, you can approximate it. Yeah, I talk a little bit in this little essay about being drawn to certain books just because there’s some allure, appeal, something I’m projecting, something the book is projecting, something I’m projecting onto the book, some relationship I want to have with the book because it’s — I don’t know — some landscape I want to find myself in someday, or I don’t know. If you think of a book as a mirror, and if you think, “That’s how I would like to look if I were a tree, or if I were a whatever,” some image. But the essay is really about the disconnect between what’s on the outside and what’s on the inside often, and what that feels like from a writer’s point of view because it’s both a disconnect and a source of — can be at least for me — a source of real anguish because you can’t really disconnect yourself from what you look like. You can try, but you can’t really. Like, when I read Unaccustomed Earth, and I try to think of it as a kind of song cycle. I try to put the cover out of my mind because I know how the covers are done and assigned. I figure the cover will mislead me because you didn’t do it, but I find I can’t put it out of my mind, even being aware of the entire process. And there’s something about the floating tiara, or crown, or whatever it is: it leaves an imprint on my impression of the book. Even though I know it’s not by you.…

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