“Nothing is ours. Life is borrowed. We’re here for such a short time and we just pass through and borrow it all. We borrow the sky, we borrow the trees. We borrow people, things, and then we let go and we pass through, and the world remains.”                                                                                                           – Jhumpa Lahiri, episode 223 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri (“Interpreter of Maladies”, “The Namesake”) joins us this week for a special episode. In vivid, writerly detail Lahiri describes being raised in a family “spread out in various places” (5:49), her late mother’s recurring presence in her writing (15:07), the comfort (and pain) of being an observer (19:02), and the vibrancy she found in Rome (33:32), which inspired her new novel (written in Italian, translated in English) “Whereabouts” (14:37). On the back-half of our talk, Jhumpa reflects on the metamorphosis that occurred in her mother’s final days (40:02), how her familial ties (from Calcutta to Rhode Island) informed her early stories (44:38), and, finally, an exhortation on why she writes (48:10).

Show notes:

• Get your copy of Jhumpa’s latest novel, Whereabouts.
• Read “Trading Stories” from The New Yorker.
• Purchase In Other Words (in English, in Italian) or Interpreter of Maladies.
• Watch Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (Criterion Channel, iTunes, Amazon).
• Illustrations by: Krishna Shenoi

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