“When I’m in the act of writing, it feels natural”

An Interview with Alina Gufran

Alina Gufran’s ‘No Place to Call My Own’ is one of the most anticipated debuts of the year, a novel that has been receiving a great deal of advance praise and deserved hype. Full disclosure: Alina was an editor and contributor here at Hammock and a dear friend of the magazine. So of course, we think her writing is exceptional. 

But having been fortunate enough to read the book before its release, it’s clear that we won’t be alone in our views. Described variously as ‘an intimate, arresting portrait of millennial disquiet’, ‘scathingly eloquent’, ‘brilliantly confounding’ and more, it’s a book that brings to the fore a new kind of south Asian fiction - unabashedly modern, sharp and real. 

I recently had a long conversation with Alina about her writing process, the release of the book, her relationship with fiction and much more. 

Let’s begin with your writing journey and how you came to writing the book. 

Well, I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, but there was never any cognisance that it could be a real career choice. Books were always a refuge while I was growing up, a safe space when I moved around between different cities or countries. Things at home were often turbulent, but books were a constant that allowed me to access other worlds and escape into them.

Ever since I was young, there’s been this rhetoric that went like ‘oh, she has a way with words’. I don’t think anybody in my family had a penchant for literature but the importance of language was always clear. There is this quote from George Saunders, I’m paraphrasing but it is along the lines of ‘writers are born in families where it’s understood that language is powerful’. That really resonated with me. 

I think it started off as a conduit for self-expression, but it soon became more than that. A lens with which to view myself, my position in the world, even a spiritual interrogation of sorts. I don’t know why, but as a teenager, I was so concerned with what it means to be alive, what it means to be from a particular place or to find any meaning in our lives or participate in the things we are meant to participate in. I was always quite skeptical and doubtful, but writing was one of the few things where I didn’t feel that way. I still have a fluctuating relationship with my work but when I’m in the act of writing, it feels natural and I come to it with zero doubts. 

Then it was about finding a career, how to sustain myself. I tried a few different types of desk jobs or even writing-related things but they all killed some bit of me, I would always come back to writing for myself out of the frustration at my job, almost as a rebellion. I ended up in the film industry but I wasn’t in a particularly good place, I didn’t feel fulfilled or intellectually stimulated, and then the pandemic happened. The industry had largely shut down and I decided to develop some writing just for myself. 

I started writing a short story about my time in Prague and some memories from then. I went to film school there and I remember feeling very intellectually engaged. It took about three months to develop that story and from that point on a character and voice started to emerge that I felt I could use. I clung to that through the pandemic and writing became a way to survive through that time, developing the character further. 

That’s interesting, many writers have spoken of the pandemic almost being a trigger to write more. When did you go from the short story to knowing you wanted to write a novel? 

Like I said, I kept writing with similar characters or the same voice for much of the pandemic. One of those stories, as you know, was published in Hammock. But even those were different protagonists or different ways of exploring things that spoke to me. I found that many of them were returning to the same preoccupations of identity, memory, family - the recurrent themes that I am always drawn to. When I read a few of these stories back, it sounded almost like there was one narrator or one voice that could potentially be developed into a longer work. Not only were there overlapping themes, I felt as though the voice that I have in most stories feels like it comes from the same narrator, so I started to shape it into what became the novel. 

Was your process after this point to outline and plan the novel, or was it to continue with stories that would fall into a structure later? 

I think because I was formally trained in screenwriting rather than literature or creative writing, I absorbed many of those concepts. Even though prose was more fluid and a place where I could break the stringent rules of screenwriting, these factors made their way into my work. When I had a few short stories and began to restructure, I used some of these techniques to examine the larger emotional or character arcs or the ‘beats’, to plan out how these disparate stories could make sense together. 

When I started to restructure and rewrite, I definitely had a larger skeleton in place but honestly, the story often goes in directions I didn’t expect or plan for. I love that point when you’re really immersed in the story and it almost dictates itself. I allowed for those digressions. It’s easy to look back now and say I planned it but honestly it’s always a mix of different processes. 

Since you mentioned the arcs of different characters, it feels like a good transition into the book itself. The novel takes place across various cities and countries, and feels almost like a journey through Sophia’s formative experiences. How conscious was this decision? 

I think it was definitely driven by places I’ve inhabited. For me, the interplay of character and setting or environment is really interesting. Cities are always a character in themselves, especially for someone like Sophia, who is very reactive and porous and influenced by her environment. The novel moves across these different cities because it added a certain momentum and because her interactions with people in Bombay or Beirut or Prague all play into who she is. These places served as an interesting mirror to her, as well as a lens for the reader to see her through as time passes. 

Speaking of time, I was intrigued by the structure that allows you to cover so much of the twenties of this character. What brought you to this?

As a filmmaker or writer, you are always manipulating time, and often about trying to condense a lot into a short amount of time. I felt that the structure of each chapter being about a year apart and moving through her twenties allowed me to examine and highlight the inflection points of what is such a formative decade of all of our lives. 

Because I started with some stories around this period, the structure seemed fairly intuitive. On a craft level, it was a bit of a challenge to select these key inflection points, and it became quite an interesting exercise. Often I found that things that seemed very momentous didn’t translate so well on the page, while others that may seem banal translated well into this structure of the novel. 

People these days seem really excited by the tag of ‘autofiction’. Do you see your work as such, and how much of your life did you bring to the novel? 

As much as I understand that autofiction is a trending genre right now, I think that pretty much all fiction is autofiction. Anything I choose to render on the page will be impacted by my beliefs and biases and experiences. Particularly in a first-person narrative, I think that no matter how much distance you try to place between author and narrator, they are always interacting. Of course, some of Sophia’s experiences and her identity as a Muslim woman are close to my life, but it’s certainly not autobiographical or a diary. 

It’s interesting you bring up her identity and relationship to religion. I thought it was very well-handled and I’d love to hear more about writing about these sensitive questions of identity. 

Maybe I’ll start with an anecdote that relates to this. When it was at an early stage, someone said that this novel ‘wasn’t Muslim enough’. That really stuck with me because the way they meant it suggested that only a novel about certain kinds of oppression or conservatism can be Muslim. I have a conflicted relationship with this because I’m not a practicing Muslim or particularly religious, but with everything that has come to pass, especially since 2014, everybody does define you to some degree by your last name or your religious identity. 

This is something I’ve experienced even as someone who doesn’t wear a hijab or has many privileges, who doesn’t perform ‘Muslimness’ in any meaningful way. But the minute a name is out there, there is this visceral change in how you’re perceived or judged. That acute consciousness was interesting to me, and that was something I wanted to explore through Sophia because it is, in a way, a loss of innocence. 

When you’re younger, there is this innate, perhaps deluded belief that you can make a change, that bigotry and bias and prejudice aren’t the way of the world. But there is a shift as you get older and moments like this where you realise that no matter who you are, however liberal or progressive or privileged, there are many moments when you are defined by the community you’re from, even if you feel quite alienated from it. 

In the book there’s a lot about her parents becoming more religious as their marriage falls apart. The parallel between a Hindu-Muslim marriage disintegrating and the political polarisation of the country was extremely powerful and I’d love to hear more about that. 

Well, growing up in a half-Hindu, half-Muslim family, there was always an inherent tension that never truly dissipates. For all of the performative secularism or acceptance into different circles, Sofia’s parents are always quite othered or exoticised or defined by this marriage. As the child of a family like that, when the family unit disintegrates, Sophia too becomes more unmoored and I thought it was a potent position to explore.

There’s an evocative quote I remember, I think from a Damon Galgut book, which says ‘what happens in the nation, happens in the family’. It’s something I have really noticed in life around me as well. It’s not just about the ruling party. Of course, since 2014 I started off feeling disdain or disgust or shock about how things seem to be getting more divided. But when I began to really slow down and examine, I’ve come to feel more and more that ever since I was a child, these divisions have always existed and now are just rising to the surface. That consciousness is something I wanted to give Sofia’s character as well.

I was hard pressed to find an interesting representation of the Indian Muslim experience that didn’t paint it as a spectacle or some kind of tragic tale. I’m aware that I have the insurance of some degree of privilege and for Sophia, her Muslimness is almost an aside. But I did feel that I wanted to write an authentic tale of people like me or in my orbit, who weren’t defined by their Muslimness internally but viewed that way externally.   

I think that’s definitely true. I’m conscious of not wanting to give away too much about the novel before it’s out, so let’s zoom out a bit from the book and return to the impending release. How did you go from manuscript to publication and how has the journey been? 

In terms of publication, I had a couple of stories out in different magazines or journals, including Hammock. I was lucky to find Ambar, my agent, quite soon after sending the manuscript out. Then it took many months to do more edits, and even longer to go from a publisher (Westland) expressing interest to the book actually becoming a reality. In some ways it’s been tough because it’s a slow process. Also because writing itself is so private and isolated, and almost in diametric opposition to the phase I’m in now, of trying to promote and market and the very public nature of that. 

I have this fear now that I won’t be able to write with abandon like I did earlier, because that’s when the most honest and risky and interesting work comes. Going forward, my expectation or hope is that I can still write as though nobody is going to read it. 

That’s definitely true. How about writing routines and your process? Do you write every day?

Writing has so many processes attached to it. I try to write daily, but more often than writing I’d say I just document. Just a long document of random scrollings and thoughts and looking back at certain moments, a journal of sorts that I’ve kept through the pandemic and after I finished the novel that is many thousands of words. I go back to that almost daily. 

Then sometimes I get a glimmer or an idea from returning to that and decide to try and write a narrative or a chapter or a story, though I certainly don’t do that every day. A narrative is always more refined and artificial and polished, but I have to do it carefully, while just documenting keeps me in touch with the practice and with my self. 

I guess we can end by asking about influences. Who are the authors you admire most? What were you reading while working on the novel? 

This is the toughest question for every writer, as you know. In different phases of my life I’ve turned to different writers. Some I return to and then don’t like as much, so many others I’m sure I will forget to mention. But there are definitely several who I can talk about who I really admire or whose work I was reading over the couple of years I worked on this novel. 

I was reading a lot of Clarice Lispector and Mary Gaitskill, I love their work. Also Annie Ernaux. I feel as though they really showed me how you can be so close to a woman’s deepest thoughts and secrets in a very brazen way. I really admire the combination of restraint and rawness they have, which takes a lot of skill. I also love Alberto Moravia, the Italian author we first bonded over. He has such a clean, clinical way of writing.

I know the book is being described as very millennial and zeitgeisty but I also feel it is influenced by many of these older authors. But of course, to have their honesty in today’s world you need to bring in the current moment, the way technology has colonised our minds and desires.

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Alina Gufran’s debut novel, No Place to Call My Own releases this month. You can pre-order it here. 

Abhay Puri is a writer and founding editor of Hammock Magazine.