The author, at around the age of three, with her parents, Amar and Tapati, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1970.
I just adore Jhumpa Lahiri for her short stories and her novel, The Namesake.  So, when I ran across an essay written by her in The New Yorker, I had to read it.  Yes, technically it’s not a short story but it is by a short story author about her childhood.
“I had almost no books to call my own. I remember coveting and eventually being permitted to own a book for the first time. I was five or six”
Jhumpa Lahiri’s was born in the United States and claims that her parents never read to her as a child.  However, on her first trip to India, with her parents, her grandfather told her stories and use to even lengthen her bed time because she hadn’t wanted his stories to end.
Her first language was Bengali but the books that she read were in English.
“and their subjects were, for the most part, either English or American lives. I was aware of a feeling of trespassing. I was aware that I did not belong to the worlds I was reading about: that my family’s life was different, that different food graced our table, that different holidays were celebrated, that my family cared and fretted about different things.  For me, the act of reading was one of discovery in the most basic sense—the discovery of a culture that was foreign to my parents. I began to defy them in this way, and to understand, from books, certain things that they didn’t know.”
When she was in school and started making friends, she started writing stories as a way to conect with her peers.  In 5th grade, she won a prize for her story, The Adventures of a Weighing Scale.

After she graduated college, she moved to Boston where she worked in a book store.  She became close friends with a co-worker, who happened to be the daughter of the poet Bill Corbett.  She started visiting the Corbetts’ frequently and she soon gained inspiration to be a writer.
I really enjoyed reading about Jhumpa Lahiri’s childhood and how she became a writer.  This essay is only four pages long and highly recommended.  You can read it here.


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