I met Sejal Shah in 2016 when I moved to Rochester, New York, to become the executive director of a literary arts organization. Shah was a beloved teacher there. We quickly developed a friendship and we exchanged numerous phone calls and emails on any number of topics, though usually about books and literature. In many ways, Shah’s story mirrored my own, and I felt a deep literary kinship with her. Like Shah, I had moved away from Western New York believing I would never return, only to boomerang back. Like Shah, I’d spent much of my adulthood trying to become a writer (that is to say, a published one). Of course, unlike me, by the time I’d met her, Shah had already published widely in a number of the best literary journals.
When she published her first book in 2020, This Is One Way to Dance, I was thrilled for her. Through linked essays, that book beautifully explores race, place, identity, family, and culture, but woven directly into the tapestry of its design is a broader sense of becoming. How do we become the people we strive to be? In her new book, How to Make Your Mother Cry, Sejal expands on some of these themes, but she does so in a unique, hybrid format that braids short stories, poems, images, and fictional letters into a collective narrative that luminously portrays the life of a Gujarati American woman growing from girlhood into adulthood in a culture that all too often devalues girls and women—and outsiders. Twenty years in the making, How to Make Your Mother Cry is a book that demonstrates the lyrical and majestic power of fiction to illuminate the small yet meaningful moments of a life spent in search of meaning. A life spent in the process of becoming.
The following interview took place via email in March 2024.
K.E. Semmel: How to Make Your Mother Cry was composed over two decades. That’s some incredible persistence. What were some of the challenges you faced in getting this book out in the world?
Sejal Shah: I just couldn’t let the book go and I wanted to let it go and sharing it with others seemed to me the best way to let it have a life in this world. Maybe what I mean is that the book wouldn’t let me go. It insisted I pay attention to it. Different versions were named finalists in both Sarabande Books and Pleiades Press contests. So it came very close to being picked up, but that version of the book didn’t include images, ephemera, or poems. Those elements came later, as I continued to work on it. Other presses expressed some interest, but ultimately passed. It was hard not to give up, but I believed in the stories so strongly that I felt they deserved to be out in the world. I am stubborn. And the book haunted me a bit, wanting to be known. My agent sent it out and when it wasn’t picked up, she said I think you should move on and write the next book. But then, the former director of West Virginia University Press, Derek Krissoff, reached out to me directly and asked if I had a manuscript. He took it right away. And that’s how it happened. Since WVUP is a university press, How to Make Your Mother Cry still had to go through a peer review process, which took more time, but ultimately made it a stronger book.
KS: I’m intrigued by your use of the word “fictions” in this collection. Why use that word instead of “stories”?
SS: For a long time, I have called myself a writer of fictions and truths—it’s even on the signature of my email and it’s the tagline I used in my first website. So, there’s that. I also realized that to the non-writer, story can mean nonfiction or fiction. We ask if something is a true story. My friend Minna Zallman Proctor’s memoir-in-essays, Landslide: True Stories is an example of the word stories being used for nonfiction, though she mitigates that by using true as an adjective for stories. Especially because I knew my fictional stories might be read as nonfiction/fact. I am better known as an essayist, as a writer of nonfiction, and my first book—This is One Way to Dance—is an essay collection, so I wanted to emphasize that this book is fiction, is made up of fictions. I also like that one can access certain kinds of truths in fiction better than in nonfiction. At one time, the subtitle—and I like weird subtitles—was fictions and truths (referencing the idea of truth in fiction), but then one of the peer reviewers misread the whole book as memoir. It’s not. So, I decided to just stick with fictions.
KS: Let’s dwell on this for a moment. The linked stories in the book are told from the point of view of V, a Gujarati American woman, a writer who might resemble Sejal Shah but who is not Sejal Shah. There are plenty of writers who’ve done this sort of thing, but we’re living in the Age of the Internet, when misinformation proliferates and critical thinking skills are devalued in favor of quick consumption of content. Considering one peer reviewer mistook the book to be a memoir, what would you tell readers approaching this book and your work for the first time?
SS: Well, that reviewer read the manuscript when the subtitle was “fictions + truths, lies + solaces.” To me, the inclusion of fiction and lies means that the work is fiction, but due to that subtitle and a note to the reader that I had written, they read it as nonfiction and “mis-genred” the work.
I would also tell my readers that there’s magic and alchemy in fiction, in not having to be faithful to facts. Most writers draw in some way from their own experiences, but this is just a part of the process. To write fiction is to imagine. At one time the stories in this book were part of one hybrid (fiction + nonfiction) manuscript without the stories and essays being labeled as such. It was interesting to find that in such a manuscript some of the stories did get read as nonfiction. Later, I separated out the essays, because University of Georgia Press’s Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction was interested in publishing them, and they became This Is One Way to Dance.
In poetry, there’s never or rarely the question if something is true or whether or not it happened or even, often, if the speaker in the poem is a version of the poet or another, imagined speaker. But in prose, we (publishing, bookstores, teachers) divide prose into fiction and nonfiction. When I divided my original book, I had to run each essay and story through a process: can I call this nonfiction? The stories are fictional prose in which there are imagined and made-up elements. I’m a stickler about truth (to get as close to the truth of the writer and her point of view as possible) in nonfiction and these stories could not have been part of This Is One Way to Dance even though they are first-person narratives and may sound essayistic. I may be writing about familiar landscapes (say, Rochester and Western New York), but the stories are fiction. V. is Indian/Gujarati American, but something like one in six people in the world is from the South Asian subcontinent. Is V. me? No. Do we share some of the same background? Yes. But what was most important to me was getting at the emotional truths of my protagonist and characters and what they are grappling with. That’s what the heart of this book is for me.
I would also note that white writers who write white characters and men of all backgrounds who write fiction in which some details about the protagonist adheres to details about the writer’s life don’t get asked the question of whether their fiction is actually memoir. Their fiction is more likely to be accepted as fiction. I would argue this difference in readers’ assumptions is raced and gendered.
At one time I had the following disclaimer at the beginning of the book: “People always say I’m sorry about your sister. I don’t have a sister. I have a brother.” I had hoped that would be a way of addressing the (I believe gendered, even misogynistic) desire to read stories by women mostly as confessional or nonfiction. Why not believe in the craft of fiction? If a story seems true, then I think there’s something being done right. I would also ask why does it matter whether or not a thing actually happened? Fiction is often based on true events, but these events are transformed by imagination and do not only belong to the author or her lived experience.
KS: You’ve described this book to me as a kind of album, even going so far as to have a soundtrack, liner notes, and ghost tracks. What do you mean by that?
SS: I was listening to a lot of CDs when I was working on the book, after many years of iTunes single songs divorced from the context of an album. There’s something about listening to a CD all the way through, but also skipping to the tracks that resonated most with me that reminded me of how I read essay and story collections and the whole concept of an album. I worked on How to Make Your Mother Cry and decided on the order and the accompanying images during the pandemic. It was a lonely time and liked to listen to music on repeat and dancing to some of the tracks that resonated for me with the book. (You can see some of these dances on Instagram at @sejalshahwrites.) The songs often echoed themes or the feel of a story. This part of the process was so strong for me that I decided to actually have a soundtrack in the book of many of those songs. I liked the idea of taking the album metaphor further by thinking of the notes and acknowledgments as liner notes and ghost tracks.
KS: In some fictions, you shift deliberately between first and third-person (or even second), sometimes within a single paragraph. When we first talked about How to Make Your Mother Cry as an album, I loaned my CD of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks to you, one of the great story albums of all time. Dylan has famously shifted person while re-imagining his classic song “Tangled Up in Blue.” Can you talk about the importance of these pronoun shifts in your work?
SS: I knew you’d find a way to bring up Bob Dylan! In my work, I’m often thinking about who the audience is and this often shifts for me. I think you can’t grow up between or part of at least two cultures as I did and not have a keen awareness of multiple audiences. Speaking of songs, there’s a pop song from twenty something years ago, “Everything She Wants,” by this band, Vertical Horizon, which has a dramatic pronoun shift in it as well–the lyrics start out in the third person “He’s everything she wants, he’s everything she needs …” and then escalate to “I am everything you want ….” as though the singer is confessing a different relationship to the female character/love interest. I made most of these pronoun shifts intuitively in my stories and I think they create some tension and surprise. I know there’s the risk that they can take a reader out of the “continuous dream” of fiction, but in each case I went back and felt through the story to see if I could defend the shift and decided I could. There’s something tangled up in trying to work something out about memory and a long-ago relationship/love affair—it’s a kind of puzzling things out that feels familiar to me in both my essays and stories and that lends itself to these pronoun shifts—taking a memory that’s a sliver of mirror and turning it around and around to see what can be seen, what viewpoints, what perspectives. I also think certain pronoun shifts, as in the pop song I mentioned and in some of my stories, add to a feeling of intimacy between the listener/reader and the text.
KS: You could say this book presents a character who is constantly an outsider. As a Gujarati girl growing to womanhood in a predominantly white suburb of Rochester, NY. As a Rochesterian trying to live in NYC, or Massachusetts, or Iowa. This outsider quality lends itself to what I see as a larger theme of finding oneself, of becoming the heroine of one’s own narrative. This is especially true, I think, in “The Half King,” a story of youthful longing and uncertainty that slowly unfolds in a NYC bar. To carry the album metaphor further, this story feels like the single everyone would be listening to if it were a song. I love this story, especially the way it’s structured in what I’d call time loops. Can you talk about the genesis of this story? In particular, how did it come to take its shape?
SS: What a great question; thanks so much for asking it. “The Half King” is in large part why I couldn’t give up on the book being published. At one time, it was the final story, but I didn’t want to end the book on this wish of becoming part of a couple. To find that kind of belonging or intimacy is a strong desire for many, but I didn’t want to make it more important than a kind of self-realization—especially for a female protagonist. I began writing “The Half King” during the year I lived in Iowa, when I was getting ready to move back to New York City. It’s a story that grew out of this nostalgia for the end of a period in my life when I felt happy, but also knew things were about to change. It took me six years to find the structure for the story. I kept working on it and working on it. An editor who read and liked the story (but rejected it) thought the story seemed to want to be a novel. I could see that: it is the most novelistic and cinematic of my short stories. But I have never been that interested in writing a novel and, anyway, I didn’t know how to write one.
I’m especially proud of “The Half King,” because it pushed me to learn how to work with time. I had to become a different and better writer in order to finish it. In terms of the shape of the story, what helped me was the title story in my friend Geeta Kothari’s book, I Brake for Moose, which I read many years ago. What stayed with me from that wonderful story were the subheadings. Subheadings in my story helped me manage the complicated movement in time within “The Half King.” Before the subheadings, it was hard for me, even as the writer, to keep track of the shifts. Subheadings give the story a scaffolding and structure that allows the reader to stay with the narrator through these shifting movements in time, or as you called them, “time loops.”
By the way, I love that you see “The Half King” as the single that would be played the most—I agree with you on that!
K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator. His most recent translation is Simon Fruelund’s The World and Varvara (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). His debut novel, The Book of Losman, will be published in October by SFWP. Find him online at kesemmel.com.
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