Chetna Maroo: “Every Time I Lost my Way, I Would Go Back to That First Page.”

Chetna Maroo is the guest. Her debut novel, Western Lane, is out now from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

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From the episode:

Brad Listi: Wow. Okay. And you said that when you came back to the work, to this piece of prose after significant time away, that you picked up from there and then developed the voice of Gopi further. What changed? Like, can you think of things or point to things that shifted in the writing of her voice that really brought it into focus?

Chetna Maroo: Yeah, I mean, I added a bit to the story before I showed it to Tom, and then I left it for another six months. I think I just wasn’t ready to write it as a novel at that point. And in those six months, I was reading a lot of stories about children and quite a lot of them were retrospective narratives. So I read, cover to cover…Do you know the Faber Book of Contemporary Stories About Childhood, contemporary stories about childhood?

Brad Listi: No.

Chetna Maroo: It’s just a really thick book of short stories. I think most of them are first person narratives. So I think that was probably really useful to have just read that and other novels. I think that maybe in the story, the voice was getting lost between the child voice and their the narrator, looking back.

But I think when I came back to it, I just started writing the first page, which I read out, and that is pretty much as it was when I started writing it. So, I think that time away and doing lots of reading and probably thinking unconsciously about it kind of gave me that first page, which was then a tuning fork. Like, every time I lost my way, I would go back to that first page.

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Chetna Maroo is the author of the debut novel Western Lane, available from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Maroo lives in London. Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review, and she was the recipient of the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction.