Featured novelist, short story writer, teacher and author of two novels Shashi Bhat, talks to AW’s Sabyasachi Nag about her craft and artisanal habits.
SN: One of the key conflicts of the central character in your latest novel The Most Precious Substance on Earth (Penguin Random House, 2021) is the indecision between her need to speak out (about a childhood trauma) counterpointed by her need to conform to cultural and familial expectations? How did you align the protagonist’s voice with the story arc?
SB: The novel explores the long-term effects of trauma and the ways in which women are conditioned to be silent. Nina has a traumatic experience while she’s in high school; she grows up and becomes a high school teacher. She never tells anybody what happened. I don’t see it as indecision, but rather inevitability. If she tells someone, she’ll be blamed and shamed; her friends and family will see her differently; the experience will follow her for the rest of her life. The tragic part is that it follows her regardless.
When the book begins, Nina is a funny, enthusiastic, and seemingly irrepressible fourteen-year-old, and I aimed to convey this with her voice. By the end, she’s wistful and skeptical and haunted, though I believe she also carries a remarkable strength. Her character’s shift is reflected in her voice. I like comparing the book’s first lines—“I started reading Beowulf about a week ago, not because it was on the syllabus, but because I am in love with my English teacher. I would read anything for him”—with its last line—“A woman wakes up shivering, in a world that is impossibly cold.” That’s pretty much the whole arc.
SN. Given the initial passivity of the central character (Nina) in The Most Precious Substance on Earth, did you feel the need for the reader to ‘like’ her’; what did you have to do to keep the reader rooting for her?
SB: I wrote the first chapter of this book for a reading I gave at a bar filled with pre-med undergrads. So I chose the point of view of a 14-year-old girl and filled the story with jokes and pop culture references to hold the attention of that specific audience. I had to ask: Why this voice? Why is it crucial that this voice tell this story? A voice like that builds expectations in a reader—that this will be a light, fluffy read. I wanted to test those expectations, and for the story to become something dark and unexpected and uncomfortably real.
I also wanted to write about Nina’s experience in a way that felt true. Ultimately, I think it’s less about likeability and more about vulnerability. While I was writing the book, a man asked me what it was about, and I said *major spoiler*, “It’s about a high school student who is sexually assaulted by her teacher.” Then the man said, “Oh, and then he’s arrested and goes to trial…” It shocked me that he imagined that’s the way these situations go. I think I laughed when he said that. Nina’s experience is the reality for so many people who experience this kind of trauma. Most rapes go unreported. Most sexual abuse survivors do not disclose, and if they do, it’s often decades later. I wanted to write a story about that experience, which many women can relate to, and even that alone should make the character worth rooting for.
SN: Bildungsroman as a literary genre sometimes tend to employ a commonly shared character journey and trope pattern: e.g. repression–freedom; memory-perspective; dysfunction-belonging-identity etc. Did you feel the pressure at any time to keep things fresh on one hand and yet deliver to genre expectations?
SB: I didn’t set out to write a coming-of-age novel, so I wasn’t confined at all by the tropes of the genre. I think coming-of-age is a convenient label assigned to stories with teenaged characters, and that a broad range of stories can exist in that category. For example, my book doesn’t have a traditional narrative arc; it’s structured as a novel-in-stories. The irresolution of the short-story style endings is intended to create a growing sense of discomfort, to make the reader feel the same way the narrator does. Nina’s story isn’t the triumphant journey to finding herself that the “coming-of-age” label might suggest; it’s a story about a woman losing herself as a result of accumulating, gender-specific experiences.
SN: Your debut novel The Family Took Shape (Cormorant Books, 2013) appears to employ a series of connected Freytag’s triangles (inciting incident – rising action – climax) to arrive at a larger narrative conveying a more encompassing beginning, middle and end. How did you arrive at this structure and what did you want to convey by choosing this structure?
SB: Yes, both of my novels are structured this way. Each book began as a single short story that later became the first chapter of the book. I love how the short story can highlight the narrative arc. I also love how in a short story, the arc is often truncated, so that we don’t get the same feeling of completeness and resolution that we would with a novel ending. It leaves more opportunity for a gut-punch or lump-in-the-throat ending, and for the kind of emotional complexity that to me feels more authentic.
With The Family Took Shape, after I wrote that first story, I composed a novella consisting of three short stories from the perspectives of different family members—the daughter, the mother, and the father. Then I kept adding stories from these perspectives, so it was originally meant to be a portrait of a family with an autistic child—the only voice we didn’t hear was his, so his character remains a kind of enigma that the lives of the other characters revolve around. But when I started submitting it to agents, I received the feedback that readers don’t like multiple perspectives and that this story really belonged to Mira (the daughter/sister), so I revised it. I’m still fond of that original idea, though!
SN: A person’s place in the family and a family’s place in the person appears to be one of the recurring themes in your novels. What are you trying to do as a writer when exploring this theme?
SB: I’m intrigued by the way our childhood experiences reverberate through later life. The Family Took Shape was very obviously about family and how the challenges the main character’s family faces impact her over time. I think a book with that theme could be written about any family and I would find it interesting.
The Most Precious Substance on Earth is also a story about the far-reaching impacts of early experiences, but her family isn’t the focus; they’re her support system and sometimes a source of pressure because of the expectations they have for her. In that case I think including her family was a way of making the character feel realistic and whole.
SN: Do you remember any experience around learning to write that became formative for you in the later years?
SB: This is a fun question. I remember in sixth grade, my best friend and I would spend recess writing stories about a dog named Ben. It was very strange and dark. Like I think Ben gets murdered at some point and then becomes a ghost. We thought this was hilarious. We showed the stories to our awesome sixth-grade teacher, and he also thought they were hilarious, but not in a haha-kids-are-weird way; he genuinely thought they were funny. This was a teacher who read The Hitchhiker’s Guide aloud to us. Then he wrote in my report card that I was a funny writer. That meant so much to me. It was a revelation; something I didn’t know about myself.
SN: Do you have a writing routine? Or writing rituals? Or patterns you must follow regularly? Or rituals that you practice say, when you are writing in certain forms, say a longer piece of work like a novel, as opposed to a shorter piece, say a poem?
SB: I meet with writer friends in cafés and we write using the pomodoro method: we set a timer and alternate periods of writing with periods of socializing. I do this a few times a week. It’s helpful for my productivity, and I get to spend time with cool people. When I’m at home I sometimes use the timer to get started, but if I’m immersed in a writing project, I can write for much longer and with no such parameters. I also read my work aloud a lot, which I suppose is a kind of ritual, though it hasn’t yet raised the dead.
SN: Can you reflect on a specific performance, song, painting, film, or other non-written artwork that generated or strongly influenced any of your recent work?
SB: My most recent novel has a scene in it that describes a concert band piece: Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E Flat. It was a piece I played in band in high school, so I found it on YouTube and listened to it over and over to get the feel of it in my head. I used it in a scene where four high school girls are smoking weed and that piece is playing in the background, so I incorporated sensory detail and synaesthesia to capture that mix of sensations. Recently I wrote a story that mentions Stravinsky’s Firebird. I was familiar with the piece but listened to a podcast about it to better understand the musical nuances and the Russian fairy tale that it’s based on, and that helped with word choice and in deciding how to use it symbolically in the story.
SN: Are there any books that you keep visiting for inspiration?
SB: I have some short stories that I re-visit: Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” Aimee Bender’s “The Rememberer,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent,” ZZ Packer’s “Brownies,” Stacey Richter’s “The Beauty Treatment,” Danielle Evans’s “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want.” There are more that I’m forgetting. I like a short story that feels like it’s juggling a few narrative threads at a time and then bringing them together in an unexpected way, so I bookmark those when I find them. And stories with memorable ending lines. At one point I memorized the endings of a few of these, in hopes that I would absorb them and write better endings of my own.
SN: Could you name a source that served as an inspiration earlier but is no longer an inspiration, rather something you are currently conflicted with or even hostile towards?
SB: I wouldn’t say I’m hostile towards it, but I used to find inspiration in writing about my cultural background, whereas now it feels like an expectation I face from others. Growing up, almost all the writers I was exposed to were white. Then in my early 20s, when I started writing seriously, I discovered Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry and Anita Rao Badami and Arundhati Roy and Bharati Mukherjee and VS Naipaul…it was exciting to see my culture reflected in books. It was nice to feel like I had permission to describe a dosa. For my characters, though, their ethnicity is a part of their identity, but it’s rarely the story’s main conflict or focus. With my first book, I was basically told to make it “more Indian.” At festivals I’ve been put in the immigrant literature category, though neither I nor my protagonists are immigrants. During Q&As, I often get questions about the characters’ cultural backgrounds or cultural appropriation, etc. I wrestle with how much “Indianness” to put in my stories. Even if I write it as a fraction of the pie, people read it as the whole pie.
Author Bio:
Shashi Bhat is the author of two books, most recently The Most Precious Substance on Earth (McClelland & Stewart, Canada; Grand Central Publishing, US), a short-listed finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award. She was a winner of the Journey Prize and has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Shashi’s fiction has appeared in publications across North America, including Best Canadian Stories 2018, 2019, & 2021, Journey Prize Stories 24 & 30, and others. Her debut novel, The Family Took Shape (Cormorant, 2013), was a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Shashi is editor of EVENT and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.