Kiran Desai makes notes when she is in pain

Two acclaimed authors getting together to exchange notes on how they make notes for their novels? The room is rapt. That’s exactly how it went down when Kiran Desai, author of Booker-shortlisted The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Mrs Funnybones Returns author Twinkle Khanna talked at the October edition of the Tweak Book Club.

They laughed about their trouble with having to decipher their messy handwriting, how they both forget to utilise some of their best sentences in their final drafts. But even with all that hassle, Desai said she still prefers to go analog first, keeping notebooks full of handwritten notes.

Sonia, the protagonist of Desai’s latest novel—her first in two decades after her Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006)—is also a writer like her creator. But her quest to find her own voice and create art does seem to stem from her loneliness and pain, and her trauma seems to enliven her writing. She, essentially, embodies the trope of the suffering artist.

When Khanna asked if she believes writers require to be unhappy to write, Desai said, “I do think that the knowledge of darkness, along with the lighter, more beautiful moments, makes you a better artist. It becomes important in a personal sphere, it becomes important in the political sphere. You go to psychological depths you could not access otherwise.”

Desai said that she tried writing a romance novel, but she realised loneliness as an experience infiltrates all parts of a person’s life. “At first, I just thought it was going to be a love story between Sonia and Sunny out in the big globalised world. But as I was writing, I realised that I could broaden this idea of romantic loneliness to other kinds of loneliness. And I noticed that all these characters come up against some kind of existential loneliness.” Expanding the idea in this way allowed many of her readers to feel seen and comforted, Desai told Khanna.

If pain produces great art, it’s also soothed or made meaningful by that act of creation. Desai said writing this novel helped her process the loss of her father to cancer. “I adored him. It was the most difficult time of my life, but I could still write in that hospital room. And he saw that, and he would say, ‘Yes, you should make notes. You’re a writer. Make notes.’ That was when I realised that something had happened where I could work through almost any situation.”

To Desai that experience embodied what it means to be an artist. “I think that’s sort of the breakthrough moment when you know that you are really living as an artist—when you are even going through extremely difficult things and thinking this is wonderful material. I’m going to write it down.”