“Characters slowly define themselves”: An Interview with Bindu Suresh

All Lit Up: Congratulations on your new novel, The Road Between Us! The story follows multiple deeply complex characters across different places and phases of life. How did you approach character building?

Bindu Suresh: This is going to sound like a cop-out, but I don’t think I did, at least not consciously. I find the characters slowly define themselves through their speech and actions, and the more they speak and act the more the boundlessness of who they can be becomes limited until they become who they are, with little help from me.

ALU: In the novel, you do a beautiful job of balancing lyricism with a propulsive narrative so that the story is binge-worthy but doesn’t compromise on gorgeous prose. And because there were several lines I highlighted throughout the book, I want to drop one here that I especially liked: “Langston asked what was wrong, and when she answered that she couldn’t tell him the weight that settled into his eyes added another layer to her grief, like a second slab of snow coming to rest over a man, buried in an avalanche.” It sounds like poetry. Can you talk about how you developed your writing style? Are there writers you admire who’ve influenced the way you write?​

BS: When I first started writing as a teenager, I wrote exclusively poetry. I wrote my first short story when I was eighteen and the first scenes of what became my first novel when I was twenty. All of which to say I was a poet (though I imagine, not a very good one!) first, and the construction of the individual line and the beauty of its wording have always been primordial to me. I then tentatively embarked upon figuring out character and then, even more grudgingly, plot. The writers who have influenced me all do a lot with a little (Alice Munro), or leave much unsaid and allow the reader to fill in the gaps (William Faulkner), or have such a commanding narrative voice that you completely suspend disbelief as a reader (Jorge Luís Borges). More recently I’ve discovered Damon Galgut, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney, who all have propulsive plots with literary execution in a balance I admire.

ALU: What’s your process of going from a blank page to a finished story?

BS: For The Road Between Us, I started with the idea of a woman calling a man from her past to ask for a favour. I knew their relationship had been complicated (though not how) and that there was an unwillingness or reticence on her part in having to ask. This, as you know, is the first page of the book. Then I went from there. The best way I can describe my process is that I sit down and write a scene, let’s say, Scene M. The next day something in having written Scene M will direct me to write Scene N. And the next day Scene P, and then maybe B, and then Z. The story doesn’t necessarily get set down in chronological order; even if it does end up being laid out from A-Z in the end it’s more likely it was revealed to me piecemeal and out of order. Have you ever been to the movie theatre and seen the game onscreen where you need to guess the name of the actor or movie and more and more pixels are added to the photo until the answer becomes clear? For me, it’s like that.

ALU: Did you carry any lessons or insights from writing your debut novel 26 Knots into your sophomore novel?

BS: Yes and no. The second time was different in that I knew I was sitting down to write a novel (for my debut I’d started writing scenes in a haphazard fashion as an undergraduate student, scenes that eventually coalesced into a story), and, moreover, a novel that people would likely read (you never know if a first novel is going to reach anyone beyond your family and friends!). So there was an intentionality in the writing of it and an awareness of the audience that, the second time, was new. The benefit of the first time is I was freer; I didn’t think anyone would read it so I wrote what I wanted. The second time, the advantage was that I was more experienced—I’d figured out how to take scenes and turn them into an arc, how to give the story an ending. So I tried to get the best of both worlds: I used the experience I’d gained, but I also tried to artificially recreate that internal attitude of freedom in order to ensure that what I produced remained beautiful.

ALU: Just like in your first novel, The Road Between Us spans multiple locations, including international ones like Beijing, which contributes to a sense of movement as you read through the characters’ life stories. I wonder, are you an avid traveller? Are the places in the novel ones you’ve visited?

BS: I am definitely an avid traveller. It’s a running joke among people who know me that if I have two or three days off in a row, I’m probably on a plane somewhere! Specifically regarding The Road Between Us, I lived for three years in New York, a year and a half in Buenos Aires and six months in Beijing, so I used my time in those locales to hopefully add a sense of realism to the scenes set in those places.

ALU: As a former journalist and current paediatrician, how do you think your jobs influence your fiction? 

BS: I’m not sure they do. Being a print journalist kept writing at my fingertips—that is, there wasn’t much of a mental hurdle to overcome to write fiction at night when I was also writing during the day—and I don’t think being a doctor influences my fiction much at all. I will say that with this latest novel I do dip my toe into the medical world; there is a character who is a nurse, who makes a medical error, and a few minor characters who end up in hospital with various ailments. I usually avoid writing about medicine, though—I worry that I’ll become distracted by its details (its diagnoses, its high stakes, the beeping monitors) and lose sight of what it is I’m really interested in, that is, the inner lives and motivations of individuals.

ALU: What are you reading these days?

BS: When I’m writing I tend to stick to contemporary fiction in English, so when I’m between projects I take advantage and branch out to other periods and languages, or works in translation. I’ve been going back to books I’d read as a teenager but don’t remember (and likely didn’t fully understand…) like The Great Gatsby, which, it won’t surprise anyone to say, really merits its place in the literary canon (in a way that I was oblivious to when I first read it at thirteen). I also try to read in French and Spanish, and so am reading a bunch of Annie Ernaux and Mariana Enríquez (even if the latter keeps me up at night). I just finished Under the Eye of the Big Bird, by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda) which was excellent.

ALU: What’s next for you? Can you tell us if you have a new book or other project in the works?

BS: I always joke that I have three jobs: being a writer, a doctor, and a mom (with the caveat that being a mom is in fact a full-time job, of course)! I think I’ll take a few months post-book to bolster my presence in my other two jobs. But yes—after I clean out our closets and finally put the kids’ winter clothes away, and learn some new tricks as a pediatrician (I want to put in the hours to become truly expert in diagnosing pneumonia in children using ultrasound, for example!), and then maybe hang out with my long-suffering husband for a bit—I’m sure a third book will be in the works.

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