Tara Menon: “If people don’t want to be friends, they don’t stay friends”

The title of each chapter in the first two parts clearly mentions the place and date. Time is of utmost importance. Looking at these dates – October 28, 2012 and December 25, 2004, some readers will immediately notice that these are the dates before the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Sandy. But the final section has a different temporality; I wanted it to feel like Marissa is coming back, coming back, with no deadline or any upcoming events. But I think that’s open to interpretation. For some readers, her return home may feel like the final one, but for others, it may seem like a short visit before she goes away again.

The theme of the nightmare in the novel focuses on how it occurs. How difficult or fun was it to write them?

There are three nightmares in the book, but I wrote five. I had the most fun writing them. I had a strict word count for them because I wanted them to fit on a single page (which ultimately didn’t happen). To me, these are subtle stories that feel complete in themselves. My editor had some reservations about starting the novel with a nightmare. As a debut novelist, I was hesitant about holding back, but I insisted on The Initial Nightmare.

These nightmares were based on the real fear created in Southeast Asia after the tsunami. There were so many corpses in the sea that people whose main diet is seafood were worried that they might be eating the flesh of bodies that had disappeared. I wanted that fear to be a part of Marissa’s psyche. The novel is very concerned with the physical body, and the scene of the actual corpse at the end of the novel is nightmarish.

From one side, under the water A very traditional realistic novel about the everyday and the ordinary. Writing nightmares – a slightly different genre – offers a different kind of pleasure.

In a way, reading Quaker Parrot’s mention of making New York his home, or Marissa being surprised by her father calling Thailand home, the reader feels that under the water Interested in original stories.

under the water Full of characters, and indeed species, trying to find home. And home means different things to different people. One question the novel poses is: What does ‘home’ mean?

Marissa’s father saying “Thailand is my home” seems absurd to her and many readers. But this is not absurd either. Thailand is an exceptionally meaningful place for them. It offers everything one wants from home. Thailand is also Marisa’s home. There is something strange in this, but it is also true. To take a completely different example, now, in 2026, it is absurd to say that Quaker Parrots are not in New York. Although it is fair to say that he should not have been brought to New York.

Here’s a question about globalization and immigration: In the 21st century, what does it mean to say that some people belong only to certain places? At the core of the book is a reassessment of what home is or can be and should be.

From the book: “Since that day, I have been obsessed with disasters”. Do grieving children see more things crumbling around them?

I think there must be some psychological studies on this, but I haven’t read in depth in that area. What I can say is that for Marissa, it’s extremely frustrating to have to deal with the fact that everyone around her lives as if everything is fine.

She went through a real disaster, a deep personal tragedy, it was an absolute horror show. Being caught in a tsunami and then traveling around the world, seeing people having picnics and eating in restaurants does not mesh with Marissa’s understanding of the world. Moments of horror and disaster – such as the killing of children by caretakers in New York or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – correspond more closely with his understanding of how the world is.

Marisa and Ariel’s relationship with knowledge is central to the novel. Please talk about attaining knowledge and its benefits?

I wanted to write about female friendships and avoid the tendency to portray them as fundamentally competitive. I think knowledge is probably the key to Marissa and Ariel’s relationship. One of the beautiful things about learning and acquiring knowledge is that it can always be a shared enterprise. If you know something that doesn’t mean the other person doesn’t know. Their relationship is based on learning together. They are constantly sharing facts with each other and going out into the woods with an arborist or an ornithologist. They don’t compete; They cooperate.

I also think Marissa isn’t being very candid about the fact that she’s not Thai. He has a sense of ownership of a place where he does not belong. But I wanted to compare it to the way tourists come for a week or two and immediately claim the place as their own. There is a difference between the tourism-related knowledge you gain about a place and what you learn while living there for years. Marisa may not be Thai, but she has an intimate knowledge of the country’s rocks and forests and beaches.

Grieving a friend should not be given the same respect as grieving a family member. Please talk about these different standards for measuring harm. There is something distorted about the way we generally think about closeness and relationships. Being related to someone by blood is the most random thing in the world. But there is a societal expectation that you should feel close to them. (On the other hand) A friend is someone you actively choose through reason and emotion. For this reason it is the most beautiful bond. Because it is not chosen just once; It is chosen again and again. In fact, a strong friendship is unlike some marriages where a choice is made and then people get tied into the relationship. Obviously, you can get out through divorce but there is an institutional structure that forces you to stay in the relationship for a long time because the cost of getting out is high. But if people don’t want to then they don’t stay in friendship. There is no legal contract between us regarding friendship. So, because we choose our friends again and again, perhaps we should mourn these relationships more.

Notice the difference in reactions to the two tragedies. Was this done intentionally?

In the case of Hurricane Sandy, there were constant warnings: The storm is coming, you should evacuate; You should buy torches and bottled water etc. In contrast, with a tsunami, there was no warning. Everyone was lying on the beach. They had no idea what was going to happen.

I also wanted the book to present the stark difference between the Western media’s response to one disaster, in which fewer than 300 people died, and another, which killed 250,000 people. I went to a school in Singapore where parents were often very concerned about deaths in the US or Europe and seemed completely unconcerned about the thousands of people dying in natural disasters in surrounding countries. Even as an 11-year-old kid I thought this was wrong. I felt the same way when Sandy happened and there were weeks of breathless coverage.

Can you talk about Marissa’s vigilance as she walks around New York?

Marissa grew up on an island among professional observers – scientists whose job it was to observe closely, whether birds or trees or manta rays. Marisa has been educated in the acts of watching, observing and paying attention.

In the New York sections, Marissa is like a one-way mirror: she can see outside, but no one can really see in. He is quite opaque and protective of himself. She is numb, has no friends, and is very lonely.

The New York section is also in conversation with the long tradition of flaneur novels. But I was interested in what happens when the gender of the flâneur changes. A young woman moving anywhere in a big city has to be on constant alert. A male flâneur in a 21st-century novel can choose what to pay attention to, but not Marisa. She is closely observed and watched, not only because of her childhood training, but also because she is a young woman walking around the city.

Would you say that your depiction of New York was an extension of your teaching work on urban narratives?

Yes. My students have asked me this: Is this urban fantasy? The New York chapters are fundamentally influenced by writing about cities.

In my academic work, I write about the rise of anonymous conversation between characters in 19th-century fiction, and how this reflects the sudden sociality that has only recently become possible in urban, industrial, capitalist cities. Marissa has had many of these interactions – carrying a stranger’s stroller down the subway stairs or being cat-called. This is part of what puts it in the category of urban fiction.

Invoking Tennyson’s poetry and the works of other authors, it appears that under the water There is an interest in language and its usefulness and impossibility in the face of events.

in Memoriam Tennyson had a huge influence under the water In many ways. There is a stanza in that poem which goes like this:

I sometimes consider it half a word to express my grief in words; Because words, like nature, reveal half and hide the soul in half

In my view, Tennyson is always talking about the inability of language to express grief in words. Sometimes this is helpful, informative and sometimes, it further obscures the feelings, making them difficult to understand. My etymological digressions in the book, looking at the origins of words like “apocalypse” and “nepenthe,” are an attempt to understand when language can be useful in this way, and when words no longer do what we want them to do.

The book features Matthew, a photojournalist and many commentaries on capturing reality. Marissa thinks some images don’t quite do it.

Yeah, I think he feels there’s something wrong with the genre itself. For example, luxury travel magazines with all these pristine and beautiful photos of places, they don’t tell you anything about the places. This may be unfair in terms of photography in general, but the book is invested in sensory details – touch, taste and smell – and photographs can’t capture them. Marissa feels that this style is inadequate in representing reality or place. To that end, there must be a better way to do this.

In the acknowledgements, you write about stealing a line from Eric Grey. Which one?

Eric is the professor who changed my life. He was my graduate thesis advisor. He taught me Victorian and Romantic poetry. This was the reason why I decided to study in English. This line is from one of his lectures that all of Tennyson’s poems are a response to the death of (Arthur Henry) Hallam. not only in Memoriam But ulysses And tithonusFor example. Hallam’s death changed Tennyson’s life. Much of what he wrote was in reaction to Hallam’s death. That was really the greatest thing for me, experiencing such a deep grief that everything you write becomes a response.

Saurabh Sharma (he) is a non-binary, queer writer, essayist and culture critic. On X: @writerly_life; Instagram: @writerlylife.