Finding Home Between Fiction And Truth

I don’t know if this is expected of all non-white readers, but in my experience as a South Asian person, I think a lot of people expect me to have read—if not loved—writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai, and more. So, it’s always awkward to admit that you’ve read very little of them, always for a class, and even if you’d read them outside of a class it would be a lie to say you loved them.

I would never dispute the literary quality of their work or the deep insight with which they construct their stories and characters, but as (yet another) huge change of “Do I get to stay in one place, or move back to a home I barely know despite always calling it ‘home’?” looms over me, I find that fiction like the ones penned by the aforementioned authors feels at once, too much and not enough.

I’ve written previously about how fantasy has always been a metaphoric home for me, but lately I’ve been finding joy in contemporary fiction. I thought, perhaps, reading a YA book on similar topics may help me feel a little … “unlost”, shall we say? (I am trying very hard to not use the phrase “find myself” because firstly, I hate that phrase and secondly, I am trying to find something very much external to me.) I decided to try Mitali Perkins’ You Bring the Distant Near but despite the fact that I loved the characters and the manner in which they handled their various struggles, the book—like the ones I read in school and college—felt much too real and yet not at all similar to my own circumstances. Definitely the sign of a good book, just … not what I needed.