Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing: “I Don’t Understand How It Happens”

Do you ever see those stories detailing “how people work” — like, here is my perfect desk and my completed to-do list and here is how organized I am, always — and feel utterly perplexed by the general togetherness of the rest of the human race? Or maybe it’s just me, but that’s why I found this New Yorker sit-down with the writer Jhumpa Lahiri to be refreshingly, honestly vague about it all: Lahiri has no idea how she writes her books.

It’s a very mysterious process, at least for me. I still don’t understand how I write a story or a book. I don’t understand how it happens. I mean, I know it takes time. I know it takes effort. I know it takes lots and lots of drafts and hours. But I still really don’t understand the internal mechanism of how it really happens.

Her new novel, The Lowlands, is out this week; presumably, it involved lots of drafts and hours of work. (See also.) [The New Yorker]