For the past 20 years, Kiran Desai has led a semi-hermetic existence focused on writing The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a 688-page multigenerational love story set in India and the U.S. “The problem with writing a fat book,” she says over Zoom from the village of Donnini in Tuscany, “is that you pretty much do nothing but work on it.”
Desai is at the Santa Maddalena Foundation writers’ retreat, where she has come to read over her novel—which will be published by Hogarth in September—one last time. “I’m a crazy person, frankly, when it comes to writing,” she says. “I’ve labored over every sentence in this book for hours—more than hours, months.”
And while rural Tuscany may be idyllic, Desai says she prefers to work in her “boring” apartment in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, where she has plastic bins filled with drafts of the novel and piles of notes and literary detritus related to its production. “There was a time, for a long stretch of years,” she adds, “when my life and writing were absolutely the same thing.”
Desai, 53, writes about multiculturalism, race and class, immigration, postcolonialism, and family dynamics across generations and landscapes, from India to the U.S. She’s the author of two previous novels: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, her 1998 debut, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the 2006 Booker Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The books have sold approximately 850,000 copies in North America, according to their publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, and have been translated into more than 40 languages. “After The Inheritance of Loss, I felt free to think of myself as a writer,” Desai says. “But when it takes you so long to write the next book, you’re back to square one—to the place of doubt.”
A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age: a layered, at times mystical romance, set primarily between 1996 and 2002, about two lonely, aspiring Indian writers in their 20s whose families have a rocky history—and may be trying to keep the couple from getting together. “I think I must have always wanted to write a novel that’s an old-fashioned love story, but I was embarrassed to write a love story,” Desai says. “It’s a big challenge, especially if you consider yourself a literary author.”
Zambian American writer and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell, who’s known Desai for a decade, praises the author’s ability to tell an epic tale. “People sometimes think that long novels are the result of an undisciplined approach to writing, but I saw Kiran carving this book out of over 1,000 pages,” Serpell says. “There’s great precision and purposiveness to the way she created it. It’s a labor of love.”
Born in Chandigarh, India, and raised primarily in Delhi, Desai was a quiet kid who looked up to her mother, novelist Anita Desai, 88, who’s been shortlisted for the Booker three times, and who balanced a career with raising four kids. “I always had a sense of a writerly life and the discipline you need,” Desai recalls. “I didn’t need to fight hard to create it. I grew up with it.”
In 1986, after Desai’s mother and father, a businessman, separated, Desai moved with her mother to England, then to the U.S. a year later. In 1993, she graduated with a degree in literature from Bennington College, followed by an MA in English from Hollins College and an MFA from Columbia University in 1999—by which time she’d already published Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Since then, she has lived by the pen. “I chose to write every day,” she says, “My work is a result of those choices.”
Desai calls her mother a major force in her creative development, always there to offer a guiding hand. “My mother is a remarkable woman. Years of my life have been spent with her working in one room and me in another room. She reads my drafts and gives encouragement when it comes to the risks I’m taking.”
Desai’s books are never about one thing, and her latest is no exception. More than a romance or a family saga, it’s a novel that explores Indian and American culture, dating and arranged marriage, patriarchy, the challenge of being an artist, and the acute loneliness of living in a world that never quite feels like home. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d return to India so strongly in my work over the years, but I’m still seeing the value of working between countries,” Desai says. “It’s a wonderful place to work from the diaspora.”
When the novel opens, budding fiction writer Sonia is in college in snowy Vermont, where she has a toxic relationship with an older painter who’ll cast a shadow over her life, and Sunny is in Brooklyn, living with an American girlfriend and trying to become a journalist. Both return to India, meet, and fall for each other, but their relationship is tenuous—they’re struggling in their careers and have traditionally minded parents who have expectations about whom their kids should become.
In its starred review, PW called the book “an elegant bildungsroman,” adding, “Desai’s artful prose is subtle even when pitched on a grand scale.... This ambitious yet intimate saga is well worth the wait.”
David Ebershoff, Desai’s editor, describes The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny as a sprawling story handled with a light touch, and notes that its length is part of the experience. “It’s a real pleasure to read,” Ebershoff says. “Kiran’s eye can roam over anything in a scene. Whatever her eye lands on is interesting because of the way she reveals a detail. The book has so much to offer readers. I think a lot of people are going to fall in love with it.”
Desai notes that being an immigrant and an outsider have helped her grow as a storyteller. “As an immigrant, you always have an element of being lonely,” she reflects. “I think to be lonely as an artist is a gift.” And there’s no better place to be lonely than New York City. “When I get off the plane in New York I let my guard down. The taxi driver is shouting at me; I’m shouting at the taxi driver. He’s insulting me. It feels like home.”
Desai relishes being at her desk in Jackson Heights. “In many ways I live my life within art, within my work completely,” she says. “I’m glad I didn’t succumb and become a banker.” She smiles. “I’m proud I didn’t go that way.” She’s ready to write another book and hopes it won’t take 20 years to complete. “It’s hard to be able to live as a writer, but it’s the one magical door that has somehow remained open for me. I don’t look at it too carefully for fear that it will shut.”