The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
The Layers of Legacy in Nayantara Roy's Debut Novel The Magnificent Ruins
Discover the intricate layers of family dynamics and cultural identity in The Magnificent Ruins, the debut novel by Nayantara Roy. Set against the vibrant backdrops of Brooklyn and Kolkata, the story centers around Lila, a millennial who inherits her grandfather's crumbling mansion, unleashing a wave of family secrets and legacies that challenge her understanding of self and history.
Nayantara enriches our conversation with her multicultural experiences, navigating the dual identities of a television executive and novelist. Her reflections on the cultural nuances of silence in familial relationships and the complexities of unspoken expectations within traditional Indian contexts resonate deeply, inviting listeners to explore their backgrounds.
As we delve into essential themes, including the process of writing across different mediums, Nayantara shares her unique insights into storytelling, emphasizing the interplay between words and visual narratives. This dialogue addresses sensitive subjects such as inherited trauma and the delicate balance between tradition and personal choice, making it relevant to anyone who has wrestled with their family's legacy.
Join us on this thought-provoking journey as we uncover the inspirations behind The Magnificent Ruins and gain a deeper understanding of how stories shape our identities. Check out the episode for a fascinating look into Nayantara's creative world, and be inspired to explore your own stories. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review!
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 284. And 84.
Speaker 1:Before I get started with the interview today, I wanted to share a couple of events I have coming up. The first is next Sunday, march 9th, between 2 and 4 pm, I will be in conversation with acclaimed author, poet and president emerita of Penn International, jennifer Clement. This event is at Ojai Roots Farm Shop, 315 North Montgomery Street in Ojai, california, and you can sign up for this event on my website, which is wwwmandijacksonbeverlycom. Forward slash events. The other event is the Lunch with an Author literary series in Santa Barbara and it will be held at the Santa Barbara Club on Thursday April 10th from 12.30 to 3pm, and this is with Edward Humes, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and Penn Award winning author. Ed and I will be in conversation speaking about journalism and his latest book Total Garbage how we Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World. Brilliant book Tickets include a three-course luncheon, coffee and tea and a copy of Total Garbage, so I hope to see you there. All of these events require reservation and prepayment and, once again, you can go to my website at wwwmandijacksonbeverlycom forward slash events and you can get your tickets there. I hope to see you. We have fabulous authors scheduled for this series in 2025. And I hope to see you at the San Diego Writers Festival on Saturday, april 5th. I will be moderating a panel with Bethann Patrick, megan Beattie and author Dawn Tripp. Okay, and here's this week's interview.
Speaker 1:Nayantara Roy is the author of the Magnificent Ruins, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice Novel of 2024, an LA Times Editor's Pick, a Washington Post Best Book, a People Magazine Best Book, an Apple Best Debut, a Hatchet Book Club Pick, a Lily's Library Pick and a Gold House Book Club Pick, amongst others. Her second novel, sisters of the Halved Heart, is forthcoming from Algonquin Little Brown in the summer of 2026. In 2018, roy won the Rick DeMarine's Award for her short story 8C. Her plays have been performed internationally in the UK and India. She is also the Senior Vice President of Television at Sandbox Entertainment, where she acquires and develops original scripted series. Roy lives in Silver Lake, los Angeles. Hi, tara, and welcome to the show. It's lovely to have you here and congratulations on the success of the Magnificent Ruins which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I mean that means so much. It's been so wonderful to hear how people feel about it.
Speaker 1:Yes, that part of writing can be both nerve-wracking and heartwarming. Well, let's begin by learning about your early life in India, relocating to Los Angeles, and what led you to become a television executive.
Speaker 2:I was born in Kolkata, much like Laila, my protagonist and you know, really was born to a family of readers. Half my family are finance bros and the other half are novelists. My granddad is a novelist, my cousin is a novelist, and when I sort of finished high school, I was curious about what I wanted to do next. I didn't want to immediately think about it. My father was very nomadic. He traveled a lot for work and we ended up living in places like South Africa and the UK and I had had a lot of exposure globally family all over the world as well and so it was a natural decision to want to study abroad and I did.
Speaker 2:I went to school in the US and what ended up happening is that right after I did a bit of work in publishing and it was an interesting period for publishing where you were really seeing the movie studios come in and acquire IP in a way that they hadn't before.
Speaker 2:They were buying books to make into TV shows and so on, and all along I was like maybe I want to write that novel someday and my dad was like, yes, on the side, keep going on your career, my wonderful Asian dad who is actually my person and what ended up happening is that working in that publishing business sort of made me realize that what I really wanted to do was what the television executives were trying to do. What I really wanted to do was what the television executives were trying to do, and, like a good Asian child, I once again went to school to learn how to do that. I went to graduate school at Columbia and while I was there I also took a fiction class called Other People's Secrets. It was just an extraordinary class and I wrote an essay at the end of it that semester. That ended up being the genesis of my book. But I also moved from New York to LA and got myself a career in TV.
Speaker 1:Do you enjoy your work in television and what do you gain from it?
Speaker 2:I'm so grateful to it. It has, you know, sort of provided me with such stability. I say that now, but it's a really tumultuous industry and it's really taught me to understand story from a different perspective, right, if you think about it, books and chapters are very sort of akin to episodic television and I think when it's good, that can be an extraordinary experience. Watching a season of something I've also had the pleasure of, you know sort of seeing that process end, to end myself taking a book and then working with a screenwriter to develop it into a season of scripts and then giving notes when it comes back to me fully in cuts, that, I think, is an extraordinary experience to have for any sort of creator. So I'm very grateful to the business for having given me that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think being on a set or part of a crew in film or TV and also theater, is a wonderful stepping stone to becoming a writer, because you learn about dialogue. You also learn about action and you learn about that beautiful pause, that moment of reflection, for either the reader or the viewer. So, yeah, I think that it's just such a wonderful introduction to becoming a writer. Sounds like you've been on a set. Yes, I have. I was a costume designer and stylist for many years. I worked with photographers in fashion, in beauty and a lot of music videos and live concerts, and my husband was a key grip. He's now retired. So, yes, I have been on many sets and sometimes the chaos is what kind of gives you that adrenaline to make sure everything comes together. It's such a wonderful learning tool and it's not until you've been on a set that you actually understand what goes in to the making of a film or a video or a commercial. It's insane.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and it's so humbling because you know up until the agent reads it or your readers read a first draft. Writing a novel is a pretty isolating experience. It's you and your laptop and in a way it's also much more focused, much more. There's much more room for thought and reflection. For television it takes a village and I would argue that you know it takes a village to see a novel through to publication and my editor really helped shape this novel into what it is. But it does take a village in television in a way that you don't see. I don't know if most people they probably don't realize that one season of television costs between 60 and 80 million dollars on a streaming service to make and that's an extraordinary amount of money and responsibility in people's time.
Speaker 1:Yes, it sure is, Tara. Can you remember when writing entered your life, because you're not only a writer of novels, but you've also written for theater life.
Speaker 2:Because you're not only a writer of novels but you've also written for theatre. Yeah, and in high school I was kind of known as the writer. I won writing contests. I was editor of my school magazine. It was always assumed that I would be a writer of some sort. But where I come from, it isn't really a career to pursue right away. It's not like here where I imagine you could just major in writing and then go to schools like Iowa or Columbia for writing for graduate school. It's not quite like that in India and it certainly wasn't in the 80s and 90s. There are magnificent novelists coming out of India every day, but I'm sure they would attest to the fact that it is a path not often trodden.
Speaker 2:I think writing was always in the water for me. I can't think of a single point in my life where I wasn't writing something. I wrote a short story before graduate school that won a prize. It sort of drifted in and out of my life, won a prize. It sort of drifted in and out of my life. I took that class at Columbia and it became what would eventually be my first novel. But all through that I was writing right out of school. I was writing in plays in Bombay that were eventually produced and performed, and so I think I've always had this dual identity. Once I entered my television career in earnest I started sort of feeling a little more imposter syndrome, you know around writing I was like, well, hi, I'm Tara, I'm a television executive. It's much harder. And my friend Rachel the other day at her party was like this is my friend Tara, she's a novelist. And I was like, oh, is my friend Tara, she's a novelist. And I was like, oh, I guess I am.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think that's a wonderful thing about life. We are constantly changing, discovering different things in our life and becoming the person we end up being. I think that's exciting For our listeners. I'd love it if you could share the synopsis of your novel the Magnificent Ruins.
Speaker 2:In the Magnificent Ruins you meet Lila, who is a millennial. She's 29 when we first meet her and she lives in Brooklyn. She's Indian American, she's successful, she's a books editor at a major publishing house which has just been acquired by a bigger company, and she's a millennial in every way. She makes complex choices about her career, her lovers, her family, and she sort of also lets life happen to her. Lila doesn't proactively go and get life. You know that.
Speaker 2:You get the sense that she's coasting along and then one morning Lila wakes up and realizes that her grandfather is dead her maternal grandfather all the way in Kolkata in India, and then she finds out he's also left the family mansion to her, this decaying, crumbling property that the entire family still lives in her extended family, her mother and her grandmother and she's seen none of them in a long time. So Laila must make her way back to India, and when she does that she has to deal with a lot more than paperwork. There's a lot of secrets and inheritances that aren't just tangible, that aren't just a house. The story, ultimately, is a story of what we inherit, that runs in our veins.
Speaker 1:Something that captivated me in the story is the fact that the house becomes a character. As you said, the walls are steeped with stories and secrets.
Speaker 2:And it's been a real revelation to me to see how people respond to the house. You know the cover designer immediately wanted to put it right on the jacket. You know my editor sort of called it like you did just now, intuitively its own character, I think, when a generation, when generations of family own a historic property and those houses in Kolkata, the Zamindar houses, come with a lot of dubious post-colonial legacy but they're a semblance of what they used to be, but they are still so breathtaking. It's inevitable when generations pass through homes like that that there are stories that only can be told within the walls of those houses. So I think you're right.
Speaker 1:Well, that was one of the pieces that I really loved about the story. Are there parts of the story and locations and the characters that are based on real life, your family or friends.
Speaker 2:I was born in Kolkata and Laila was born in Kolkata and while Laila is younger, more reckless, and she sort of took me by surprise when I was writing her, you know there are moments in the novel where I was just like, don't do that. But it was inevitably that she would go there. She would do that. She and I have both lived in Brooklyn, places that we understand deeply for its milieu, and the idea of being an insider and an outsider at once, just given how many places I've lived in, is very real to me.
Speaker 2:I wanted to write the book because I wanted to write about cultures of silence, legacy families, specifically in Kolkata, that have cultures of silence shrouding them, where one is expected to keep up with a certain facade for the rest of the world, and you could say most families do that. But these families do it in such a way because there's so much at stake. You know, sort of, if you think about the amplified version of that, it's the royal family, right. What goes on within private walls is never quite told and I think the darker territory of the book sort of wants to, like Lila, confront that and deal with that and understand what parts of her history have shaped her and that continue to shape her mom, her grandmother and her.
Speaker 1:And within the story is an undercurrent of abuse between a man and a woman living in the family compound. Was this facet of unspoken violence in the initial concept or did it grow as you wrote the characters?
Speaker 2:That is an excellent question. No, the initial sort of idea in my head, you know, when I was starting to put the assemblance of a novel together, was I knew there would be the house. In India, these families are made up of sometimes even 40, 50 people at the same time, and I knew that people would have to become composites of each other and become contained characters. And at its core I wanted to tell the story of three generations of violence, of how these women had been impacted right, and I wanted to tell a story that would also be enjoyable for people to read. What then happened over? It took me seven years to write the book.
Speaker 2:What then happened was that I gave it structure. I talked to fellow authors, specifically a friend that I was working with, and I did an outline, and in that outline it just seemed necessary to infuse not just the man and the woman but also the city. There's an undercurrent of danger that sort of wraps itself around the fate of the city as well, around the fate of the house, the couple that are sort of confronting the issue of violence, and then the three women, and it makes it sound like a really dark book. But I would say, you know there's darkness and light, which is to me anyone's home.
Speaker 1:And you definitely have to have that tension between characters when you're writing an epic family story. Now can you expand on the idea of family discipline, respect and what is spoken of and kept secret in Indian culture and expand a little on what you mentioned earlier, the cultures of silence?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. What was so intriguing to me when I was I want to say 25, 26, and first started thinking about it, was that what is considered discipline in one culture perfectly normal was something you could get called. You know, social security would be at your social services, would be at your doorstep for it in another country, and the approach to what is considered abuse versus love, and there's this thin line, sort of trembling, in between those two things. That's all coming from a place of I deeply want my child to succeed and do well. I definitely think that the culture in India is not that different. When I started talking about it. You know what happens to Laila had happened to my African-American friends, my Chinese-American friends.
Speaker 2:As it turns out, the way we discipline children when we are immigrants, when we are communities that really, really want our kids to succeed, travels across cultures, when it's not quite understood that this in fact could be a legacy of violence you're passing on. One of my friends, the author Sunil Yap, has said that the novelist chewed easy villains. You know it was really important for me to track the ways in which violence had played out over generations, the ways in which it had been normalized and shed some light around the inherited patterns of thinking versus that's bad, this is good. Look how America, you know, sort of says no violence, even you know, for the most part it's sort of like this is not great and that culture does this and it is great. I just wanted to sort of track those patterns and see where they came from and verbal abuse.
Speaker 1:Having been one that has suffered from the effects of verbal abuse, I think it's one of the reasons why I feel living in another country is so important. When you're living in a country that is not the country of your birth, you are forced to become more patient and understanding with those people around you. When I lived in Australia, I was innately aware of the verbal abuse, the putting down of women, and it really was painful and I had to get out of there, partly because nobody understood what was happening, what the effect of the words they were saying had on women, and that, to me, is just heartbreaking. I often wonder where that behavior comes from. What's the history, what's the inherited suffering of thinking that it's okay to speak in that way? It's definitely the reason why I feel it's important to live in another country, if you can. It opens your eyes and makes you question how you feel, and this also teaches us to not question things immediately, but to gain an understanding of the history or the cultural reasons of where such behavior derives.
Speaker 2:You make such an important point. You know, lila's mother also punishes her through silences, right, silence and words are just as powerful as physical abuse. Said to me an anecdote from her studies, which was that you know the impact not the initial physical impact, you know, but the long-term effects of verbal abuse, including silence, right, not saying a word is sometimes as powerful as saying it. Are similar to sort of patients who have experienced that physical abuse and that makes perfect sense to me. So what you're talking about, the way a culture operates with verbal abuse, that's just exactly just as powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love a book that makes me want to do research Now. The Magnificent Ruins is set in 2015, and it wasn't until 2016 that the Supreme Court of India decided to review the criminalization of homosexual activity. I appreciate how you wove this into the story, not in facts and figures, but through emotion and the torment faced by your character. Now, with this in mind, are LGBTQ plus communities now protected in India, or are they still ridiculed?
Speaker 2:I think there's two parts to that question. The first I would say is it would be crazy, you know, with such a large ensemble cast large ensemble cast not to have someone who was queer in some capacity. That you know it's just normal to have, you know, different kinds of characters, but the contrast of what that meant in that particular society in Kolkata is very different from the contrast that it meant for Laila's stepbrother, half-brother, to be gay, and I wanted to track that. You know, things have come a long way in India but things are also the same.
Speaker 2:Class is a big factor, right? If you're wealthy and, let's say, living in South Bomb, or you come from a legacy family in Kolkata today, chances are your parents are a little more open to the idea of your happiness and your true identity. I think across the world people would say it really does depend on the family, but there's been a normalization that I hope has carried into, you know, certain echelons of Indian society. The problem is the majority you know still view it as something to be ashamed of and that's just something that's trickling down straight from the government right Up until you give a community free reign. You give them the right to inherit. You give them the right to marry, you give them the right to have children to be loved, exactly, you're saying aloud that it is not okay, and so I think that feeling is still pervasive, at least in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Well, you did it beautifully in the book. You can't help but feel empathy for this person. Now, tara, I would love to hear your publishing story, from the magnificent ruins finished manuscript to getting an agent and landing a publishing deal.
Speaker 2:I listened to a lot of podcasts such as yours, and what I've understood and learned is, you know, I think I got a little lucky along the way. When I had finished the book and this was a 600-page version of it I took it to two agents that I admired in the UK. They loved the book, they got on the phone with me and they talked about it, but they didn't agree with some of the choices I made. For instance, she sort of ends up romantically at a certain stage and they wanted her to do something different. And I took that feedback in my stride and then I spent another six months sort of reviewing it this is, you know, 2020, I want to say I'm working from home at my television job and I'm sort of thinking about how to take their feedback and then I revised it into the truest version of the novel. Lila follows Lila's own path. Sometimes even I cannot dictate what that is and it became a more compressed, contained sort of rimming with the things that I wanted it to, kind of novel. And then I queried aggressively I didn't just go to any one person or go back to them, I queried like maybe 30 agents and within two days one had read it. And then I was able to sort of set a fire with the others and I had multiple agents reading it.
Speaker 2:I had almost decided on that first person who had responded because she was just so passionate about the book. She's an excellent agent. Then this other person, emma Perry, who is now my agent, and she just, you know, she got it. She had worked with writers like VS Naipaul. I could tell that she and I would have a long career together and she really invested in me, you know.
Speaker 2:And then when it came time to sell the book, you know, when the initial rejections poured in, she was like don't you even worry, this is a long game, you know. And then when the offers came in, she was, you know, we'd just been together the whole way. And then I happened to land an editor who just felt exactly all women, you know, even my film agent is a woman. And I think the key has been people who truly love the book, because if that doesn't happen it goes sort of a little awry. So in that I've been very lucky, because it's not an easy book, but because of the love of these people it's then sort of fueled it and my editor's been remarkable. I credit the book to her, and now I've got a second book with her.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations. Now, when do you find time to write?
Speaker 2:I just did a podcast called Writer's Routine and just writers talk about. You know their timelines. I'm fresh off it, I'm an early bird. I'm useless after 7 pm, maybe for socializing here and there.
Speaker 2:But you know, I am up at around 5, and I find those hours between 5 and 8, you know, sort of no one's awake. My fiancé is not awake, my fiance is not awake, my dog's still sleeping. There's no one at the door, it's just. And I live in Silver Lake in Los Angeles. You can hear the birds and we have a little backyard. It's perfect. My brain is fresh of the presses, you know I read. You know Graham Greene's sort of advice via the author Nelsink If you write 500 words a day, five days a week, or edit five pages a day for five days a week, it'll get done. You know it won't be as quick as you know other novelists, but it will get done. And so it got done.
Speaker 1:And luckily for us, it did. What are you currently?
Speaker 2:reading. I am reading my friend Nina Sharma's book. It's so wonderful. Nina is an Indian woman, a fantastic writer, and she married a Black poet, quincy Jones, and it's called the Way you Make Me Feel and it's the story of how they met. It's nonfiction, how they met and eventually married, but what it really is is an examination of the model minority as Asians are frequently positioned and the problem minority as Black people have been positioned so unfairly in society and what it really means internal racism within Asian families. I think my book sort of gets a little bit in that territory, but Nina, just you know, sheds light through it, razor sharp and unflinching, and yet it's the sweet, funny portrait of a marriage and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1:Oh, that sounds right up my alley. I have to comment on something. Whenever I'm looking through social media posts on Instagram, especially about books and bookcases and everything I feel a little embarrassed because my bookcases are so untidy On Instagram. There are bookcases there that I just have no idea how they keep them tidy like that, and so it is with great pleasure that I look behind you and I see your bookcase is messy too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when my fiancé first met me and he came to my apartment, he was like so you basically live in piles of books and now that we live together, you know there are still these piles. There's a pile by the window. It's beautiful, that is just my decor, but there are piles everywhere and he has learned to love it and live with it. There's. Unfortunately, it's not going down anytime soon, because my day job also involves so much writing and reading.
Speaker 1:And we have that in common. One of the things that I have found fascinating and I'm so grateful for is that, since I've been doing the podcast and the Lunch with an Author events, I read in multiple genres fiction and nonfiction categories. Read in multiple genres, fiction and nonfiction categories. It's made me a better thinker.
Speaker 2:I imagine what you do with the podcast, you know, sort of read eclectic and not necessarily always to your taste is what's happened for me in TV. I don't just read literary fiction or any particular genre and it really does open up your worldview. It's like living in different places, right, so I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 1:Tara, it has been a pleasure getting to know you and you've written a wonderful book with the Magnificent Ruins and I look forward to reading your next book.
Speaker 2:It's been wonderful, Mandy. I'm so filled with admiration for you. I can't wait to tell you more about how things develop.
Speaker 1:This was such a pleasure You've been listening to my conversation with Nayantara Roy about her book the Magnificent Ruins. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, adrian Otterhan, and graphic design by Francis Farala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.