Piyali Bhattacharya is Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and many others. She is the editor of the anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion, which was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, was named an “Asian American Literary Achievement of 2016” by NBC News, and was listed as a “Best Nonfiction Book of 2016” by Entropy Magazine. She is currently working on her first novel, an excerpt from which was awarded the 2015 Peter Straub Award for Fiction.
Let me begin by saying CONGRATULATIONS on the success of this anthology and I just wanted to say how important this book—Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion—is, not just to me, but to the landscape of publishing where the publication of such a book seemed a near-impossibility. We hear stories all the time about book projects and books that are rejected over and over again only to be published and find critical and commercial success, which in the end is such a joyous thing. This got me thinking about the last two essays—“Cut” and “Operation Make My Family Normal,” in the anthology because they are so different in subject matter and tone (just as the anthology has essays on wide ranging subjects) but united in the agency the narrators find for themselves, and that last essay ends the anthology on this weirdly optimistic note about embracing who you are and where your family comes from whilst trying to be part of a larger culture one finds oneself in. So I was wondering what the curating process of the anthology was like? There are after all so many different kinds of essays in the anthology. How did you decide, for example, that “Operation Make My Family Normal,” would be the last essay of the anthology? Or that the anthology would begin with “The Cost of Grief?”
Thanks for your deep reading of the book. I thought for a long while about how to organize the essays so that they would have the most impact. For a moment, I considered classifying them into groups – essays on love, essays on professional choice. And then I realized that to do that is to diminish all of them. Each one of these essays is about love, in all its different forms. First and foremost, even those essays which end on difficult notes regarding parents and guardians, the stories in this book are about the love we have for our parents. Each one of these essays is also about personal choice, and about women stepping into their own agency. So, I decided to let the chips fall where they may, and it turned out that if I organized them in the most mundane way – alphabetically by last names of the contributors – then a heart-wrenching essay about the loss of a parent came first, and a moving but hopeful and funny meditation on childhood family dinners came last. The sequencing of that sat very well with me.
Still thinking about how the anthology was curated and presented, I remember reading for the first time Tarfia Faizullah’s foreword—beautiful, unexpected, heart-wrenching, important and HONEST just like this brilliant anthology—and being blown away by the sheer poetry of it. And then, there were your acknowledgements and introduction so full of heart and passion. What was the process of writing those two notes for you? What was it like reading Tarfia’s foreword for the first time? How did you guys decide on what that foreword was going to be like?
When Tarfia and I first spoke, I felt we understood each other without having to use many words. As a Bangali sister, her remarkable work speaks to me on a level that I can’t always explain. I knew I wanted to ask her to write the foreword because I knew only she could capture the range of these essays, but also that she has harnessed the language – the languages – necessary to introduce all the power and force these essays bring. I’ve never been in a room with all of our contributors at the same time, but in the moments when many of us have been together, there is a kind of magic in the room. A support system. A sisterhood. That magic is what Tarfia brings to the foreword. To be honest, we didn’t have much of a conversation about it. This is the only essay in the book about which I can say this – each of the other essays required hours of discussion. But for this, I asked Tarfia if she would do us the honor, she graciously agreed, and we both knew that something startling would happen the moment we were both tapping into the same source of power.
Thanks for your notes on the introduction and the acknowledgments. All three of these pieces kind of serve as introductory comments to the book, and at first, I thought that might be too much. But the truth is that this book is so deeply personal. Every word of it is real, and every one of us who has written for it has had to fight all our instincts to do so. There is not one single essay in the book that wasn’t, at one time or another, pulled from the collection. All of us, at some point in the process, felt that we couldn’t do this. When a work is that delicate, it requires extraordinary care in its handling. All the introductory pieces serve as the book’s bubble wrap. They are not disclaimers, they are declarations of the fact that we have not shied away from truth, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also overflow with love. The acknowledgments were a particularly careful part of this process for me. They come first in the book, and they are my love letter to everyone who made this unusually emotional work possible – most notably, my parents.
Of course, this became even more sharp and, in my mind, even more necessary when my very beloved, young, healthy father suddenly passed away from a swift and violent cancer just months before the book was to be published (after so many years in the works). His loss has broken me wide open. I often think that it is precisely because I have enjoyed such a loving relationship with my parents that I have found the strength to be the one advocating for this project for so long. Losing my Babai has zapped me of so much of that energy. I will find it again, I know. I am his daughter. But I was forced to rewrite the acknowledgments for the book six weeks after his passing, and in that moment, I thought I wouldn’t survive. I think my notes to him and my strong, graceful mother are about me reminding myself that what they have given me are the tools to rebuild myself, to force my body to reform around this hole, and really, to publish this book without fear.
Hundreds of people have come out to support the anthology at various bookstores and readings and I imagine those people must have gone out and recommended this book to countless others sparking a much needed chain reaction. I read somewhere that the book very quickly went into it’s second printing once it was released. HURRAH!
I am not American but I am South Asian and naturally am friends with South Asian women and have giddily recommended this anthology to women who live across the globe. Some who continue to live in countries where generations of their ancestors were born and many who do not; they do not have American, British, Australian, Nepali, Thai or the name of whichever other country they live in attached to their passports or ethnic groups they belong to, and a lot of them, like me, have found themselves identifying with much what is written in these essays. So here is another group of women who have found parts of themselves through this anthology, and through that discovery they have begun to feel visible to some extent. Did you and the other contributors of the anthology have any idea the kind of audience(s) your book would reach out to and the kind of positive response it would generate?
Given the fact that in the past, I have identified so deeply with essays and novels that are tangential to my own experience, I did hope that the audience for this book would be wide. I did hope that these stories would make women feel visible in the ways that other women writers of color had made me feel visible when I was first starting to read seriously, even though I might not belong to the same ethnic communities they write about. On the other hand, I think that to be South Asian and to be South Asian American are two very different things. I sometimes worried about how that might play out. But I am so grateful that a word-of-mouth, grassroots campaign instigated entirely by a handful of people has brought on such a tremendous national and global response. In all the years that I was trying to get the book published, I think the voice in the back of my head that never let me give up on the project (even when everyone in my life told me to let it go) was constantly saying, “But if I can just get it into the hands of readers, maybe they’ll feel what I feel.” It is a w