I met Vauhini Vara in early 2022 during a visit to Colorado State University, where her husband, the novelist Andrew Altschul teaches. I liked her immediately (and I rarely like people immediately). When I got home, I looked up Vauhini’s work, which is when I first read “Ghosts,” an essay I went on to teach several times and that I reread every so often just to revel in the surprises of its structure, the genius way that a subtle argument sits within its competing and evolving narratives.
Vauhini’s first novel, The Immortal King Rao, came out later that year, and, in it, I recognized a similar brand of daring alongside steadiness, playfulness sharing space with a serious attention to the stakes in, well, everything. These are qualities that I knew to look for in Vauhini’s first nonfiction collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, and yet she still surprised me with the many formal innovations as well as the capaciousness of her exploration, one marked by both joy and skepticism, grief and also some (tempered) hope.
–Sarah Viren
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Sarah Viren: Searches has a polyphonic quality that I loved and that also feels rare in a nonfiction book. And yet, excluding the last chapter (which I have a question about later) the only other human voice in this book is yours. The polyphonic vibe comes instead from the “conversations” you have with ChatGPT in a series of interstitial chapters.
Tell me a little about your decision to include those conversations in the book and how you imagined your “interlocutor” both during those chats and later as a character within Searches.
Vauhini Vara: To give credit where it’s due, the idea originally came from one of my editors, Lisa Lucas! (Lisa acquired and started editing the book for Pantheon; after she left, Denise Oswald took over and finished editing it—so I got the benefit of having two amazing editors.)
After I submitted the book to her, last year, we talked on the phone, and she wondered aloud what might happen if I shared parts of the book with ChatGPT and asked for feedback. I hated the idea at first, but then I got intrigued.
Half of the chapters in this book are made up of language taken from my interactions with technology companies’ products—my Google searches, my Amazon reviews, etc.—and the organizing principle I used for deciding what to include in those chapters was that I wanted them to reveal something both about me and about the product (and, by extension, the company that makes it).
I wondered if that would happen with ChatGPT, if I fed the book to it a few chapters at a time—and, at least in my reading, it did, in ways that went beyond what I had expected.I wondered if that would happen with ChatGPT, if I fed the book to it a few chapters at a time—and, at least in my reading, it did, in ways that went beyond what I had expected. So it met that test.
A lot of my writing is somewhat experimental, but at the same time, momentum is really important to me—by which I mean, it’s important to me to set up central plot and idea questions at the beginning of a piece of writing and then see those questions through in an interesting and surprising way.
The other question I had was whether that conversation with ChatGPT—I think of it as one long conversation that spans most of the book—could contain a plot that would move forward as the conversation progressed. And, in my reading, that happened, too; I read the conversation between myself and ChatGPT as an intellectual power struggle, in some ways.
SV: This book is experimental! One chapter that felt particularly so, but that was also grounded in narrative, was “I Am Hungry to Talk.” You originally wrote it in Spanish while learning that language during your husband’s sabbatical in Spain. That version appears in Searches alongside an English version from Google translate.
I read both, the Spanish first and then the English, and I was struck how different they feel from each other but also from your voice in other parts of the book. Given that selfhood is a subject of your book, I’m wondering what you learned about the self (and also your self?) in writing that chapter in particular.
VV: I’m so glad you read both the Spanish and the English, knowing that you’re fluent in both. I believe that a writer and reader co-create any text, and I expected that bilingual readers would have a very different experience of this chapter than those who are monolingual.
Specifically, you would have seen that I make some terrible mistakes in my usage—or misusage—of Spanish; I’m really hobbling my way through the language in the Spanish version. Because of this, my ability to express myself is also hobbled in some ways—in fact, I think I come across as a narrator as an entirely different person from the narrator of the other chapters—but I hope there’s also something poignant about my willingness to try anyway.
There’s value in the effort—the essay—even when one’s technical ability is limited. The fact that the English translation corrupts that self-expression in two ways—sometimes turning my bad Spanish into good English, at other times turning my good-enough Spanish into bad English—raises a question about the effectiveness of these translation tools in improving communication across language.
At the same time, it’s also true that non-Spanish speaking English speakers wouldn’t have access to any version of what I wrote in Spanish if not for my use of Google Translate to roughly transform it into English.
If you don’t mind my asking you a question here in return—how did this chapter feel different from the voice in the other chapters? Do you read it the way I do or do you (given your different experiences with these languages and, presumably, with language in general) have a different reading?
SV: Love that. And I think there’s more than just value in the effort. I was struck by how that chapter manages to both speak to and show vulnerability but also demonstrate how vulnerability opens one up to connection. As for the “you” who was speaking in that chapter, I felt like she was somehow more circumscribed than the “you” in other chapters but at the same time more attentive to the smaller moments of the “now” of the story.
This is probably partially a factor of the close focus on those months in Spain but also felt inherent to the voice itself. Like maybe because of that hobbling you speak of, you were required to move more slowly through ideas and narrative moments, which in turn revealed their meaning differently. Does that feel right?
VV: Ooh, yes, I hadn’t thought about that myself, but it’s a really interesting reading!
SV: Returning to the book more generally, there were also a number of fun overlaps in your coming-of-age story and the broader cultural story you tell of our digital age. You were among the early users of AOL and, later, in Seattle, you hung out in the same Barnes & Noble where Jeff Bezos sometimes held meetings as he was launching Amazon.
You went on to cover technology for the Wall Street Journal, where you were offered the Apple beat just as the first iPhone was to be released. You also interviewed Sam Altman before he became a household name. I found a lot of joy in those small moments of overlap, in part because it makes you the perfect teller of this tale, but also because it reminded me of the ways that those inventions—AOL, Amazon, the iPhone, AI—have shaped my life, too.
I’m not quite sure what my question is here, but I’m curious what realizations or possibly even regrets arose while telling your personal story alongside a history of our evolving technologies.
VV: So I have to again give credit where it’s due. When I first turned this book in to Lisa last year, it actually included only the chapters made up of language from my interactions with tech products.
Lisa pointed out, wisely, that while I knew what I wanted to convey with those chapters, readers might not; they might need more context—both about the products and the companies behind them, and about my relationship with those products—in order to properly understand what those chapters were doing. She said specifically that the best version of the book would be about the relationship these companies have developed both with me and with all of us.
I definitely felt I was making a rhetorical argument through the form itself—an argument in favor of the primacy of human beings having the final word.Because my roots as a nonfiction writer are in newspaper journalism—where the presence of the narrator, as a character, tends to be so deliberately subtle as to be almost effaced—I tend to be a bit reluctant to write myself into my nonfiction as a central character, knowing that there are so many people in the world whose stories are much more worthy of telling than mine, by which I mean, the details of what they’ve experienced are interesting and significant, and those experiences speak to some interesting and significant broader story that’s unfolding in the world.
What I ended up realizing with this project, though, is that the story of my evolving relationship with technology—a narrow slice of my experience in life—actually is worthy of telling by the definition that I set for myself. Specifically, I realized both that my early experiences, especially as an early Silicon Valley reporter in the mid-2000s, were legitimately interesting and significant, and that I had an opportunity to sort of use myself as a character that could stand in for all of us in some ways.
SV: While this is a book about technology and art, it is also read to me as one about grief. Your essay “Ghosts,” which inspired Searches and grounds us in the book’s ethical and aesthetic concerns, was your attempt—using a predecessor to ChatGPT called GPT-3—to write about your sister Deepa, who died of Ewing Sarcoma when you were both in college.
A secondary grief in Searches is the collective one that many of us feel in the face of a quickly changing world: bookstores lost to Amazon, hours of our lives lost to scrolling, and, in a possible future, books and authors themselves one day lost to AI. You don’t frequently lament those losses, but you make space for them while also helping readers better understand and respond to these changes.
I wonder how much grief was on your mind while writing this book and what you feel you understand about it now—both personally and in regards to those seismic cultural shifts.
VV: While I write about my loss of my sister in this book, I don’t think of the book as being about that loss in any significant way; if it were, there’s so much more about our relationship that I would have included and so much material about other topics that I would have left out. That said, I found grief—my own grief and the concept of grief in general—to be really relevant to the book’s discussion of technological capitalism.
Grief is bound up in desire—a strong and unfulfillable desire for whatever has been lost—and wherever there is desire, there’s a business opportunity. Capital is strong and fast, so its offerings tend to take up a lot of space. But there are lots of other opportunities, too, including those tied to non-economic value systems. Art, I’d argue, is one of them. So is connection with one another and with the rest of the natural world around us.
SV: As you explain in the book, you changed “Ghosts” slightly when preparing to include it in Searches: in the original version, GPT-3 has the last word, whereas in this version, you end the essay with your own words.
In a similar move, you also stop the “conversations” with ChatGPT as your book comes to a close, and instead end with what feels like a truly polyphonic chapter: a chorus of anonymous responses to questions you posed to dozens of people about memory and everyday life and their speculations for the future.
Tell me about both of those endings—the new one for “Ghosts” and this one for Searches. What feels important about who is given the final word?
VV: I’m glad you asked about this. I definitely felt I was making a rhetorical argument through the form itself—an argument in favor of the primacy of human beings having the final word.
Some people might read this as an argument in favor of the human over the machine, which is a perfectly reasonable reading, but I was more interested in considering the interplay between human agency (both individual and collective) and the agency of those using systems—technological and otherwise—to overpower and stifle human agency.
SV: Speaking of last words….I asked ChatGPT to suggest a parting question for you—though only because I hoped you’d answer it so you would still have the last word here. So, let me step aside and turn things over to the machine:
After exploring the interplay between human agency and technology in Searches, what are your hopes or concerns for the future of storytelling in a world increasingly shaped by AI and other technologies? Do you see a path forward where these tools enhance or transform our sense of human connection?
VV: Look at that—it’s interesting what it did there, asking me a question that seems to invite a response from my perspective, but one whose phrasing is subtly biased toward a positive assessment of a potential role of AI and other technologies in human storytelling and communication.
It asks about my hopes before it asks about my concerns, for example; and it asks if I see a way in which these tools’ relationship with human connection is positive (enhance) or neutral (transform)—to which it’s easier to answer yes than no, since it’s easier to prove a positive than a negative.
What happens if I decline to answer the question? I think I will.
