“The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.
“I seldom know where I’m headed, but if the story is meant to be, you cross over to the other side—you’re inside it, and there’s an engine.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.
"It’s almost impossible to explain—but in Italian, I can be the Jhumpa who goes to buy a sandwich from the Calabrian couple at the market by the Porta Portese, who goes to the pool in Trastevere, and when I say hi to the person swimming laps in the lane next to mine they won’t have the faintest idea of my other life. Those are the moments I feel most alive and at ease. Italy’s great gift to me is the voice that tells me that I don’t have to follow the rules, that I can be who I want and write what I want on my own terms. It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own. In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized."
— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.
“It is a mysterious thing, falling in love with another language—we don’t talk about it enough when it happens.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.
“After I won the Pulitzer … My parents were stunned, and extremely proud, but I remember my father said, ‘You should always have a backup plan. You’re like a politician now, and you will go in and out of favor.’”
— Jhumpa Lahiri, in an interview with Francesco Pacifico.