Kiran Desai on being shortlisted for the Booker Prize: “I can’t write unless I vanish”

Of course, such solitude isn’t always sublime. “It’s physical too,” Desai says. “You lose your stamina, your health.” Her eyes, she tells me, are failing. “I need to rest them now. Swimming used to help, but I haven’t been doing that either.” Her confession doesn’t carry the romance of the tortured artist, just the realism of a woman who has chosen the long road over the loud one.

And yet, Desai is no Luddite nostalgist. The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia takes place in the ’90s and early 2000s and may feel like a fossil to younger readers, but she defends her decision to set the novel in the past. “Yes, it’s a book of the past, but loneliness hasn’t changed,” Desai says. “If anything, it has become more profound. The social media generation longs for depth and stillness.” In her fiction, she hopes they might find what she once did growing up: “That feeling of vanishing into a book, of letting it become your world.”

If Kiran Desai’s earlier books roamed continents, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny tunnels inward—into grief, family and the private wars we fight alone.

The most tender moment of our conversation arrives when we speak of her mother, Anita. “She was the first person who read this book,” Desai says. “When I couldn’t see the shape of it, she could.” Their relationship has evolved from the literary to the literal; Desai now cares for her 88-year-old mother when she can, reading and writing in her home, an hour and a half away. “She never made me feel like I was competing with her. She was always a reader first, a little bit editor, but mostly, a mother.”