I was raised in New England by Bengali immigrant parents and have lived practically all my life on the East Coast of the United States. Can you talk a bit about how your experiences may have influenced these stories?Ī: Certainly I draw quite a bit on the general landscape of my upbringing. Q: The stories in Interpreter of Maladies are so poignant and nuanced, that your writing has been described as wise beyond your years. If I still can’t think of anything that’s missing, and feel satisfied that the parts of the story are all justifiable and properly expressed, then I move on to something new. I like to give a story as much time as possible to ripen, to look back at things after they’ve left my system and to get feedback from a few readers. There are also cues less easy to describe, telling me to let a story go. There is a point in the process when I’m no longer actively composing and fabricating, and that is one sign that I’m about to reach the other side. In fact, I tend to think of it as a passage across a lake. Everything I write is a journey, metaphorically speaking. Please talk about your approach to determining how a story will end.Ī: Stories end when they are working to the best of my ability. Q: The stories in Interpreter of Maladies generally end without a resolution. Every so often I would come across it, thinking it might make a good title, but the story didn’t materialize for another five years or so. It lingered long enough for me to jot the phrase down on a piece of paper. As I walked back home the phrase “interpreter of maladies” popped into my head as a way of describing what this person was doing.

We stopped to chat, and he told me he was working in a doctor’s office, translating on behalf of the doctor’s many Russian patients. One day I crossed paths with an acquaintance of Armenian descent who had kindly helped me move, some time before, into one of my many Boston apartments. At first it was simply a phrase that came to me during my graduate school years in Boston. This title was born before I even knew what the story would be about. “Interpreter of Maladies” was an exception.

Q: The titles of your stories are spare yet weighty, especially “Interpreter of Maladies.” Can you tell us a bit about how you came up with that title?Ī: Usually titles don’t emerge until I’m well underway with a story, and sometimes I finish something and still have to search for a title.

Stories in interpreter of maladies