Jhumpa Lahiri...

It's strange that I am currently reading 3 books simultaneously, somehow ended up starting all 3 and it's all going parallel now...so will take time to finish and post all the reviews! One of it is Jhumpa Lahiri's latest - Unaccustomed Earth - a collection of short stories. I have finished half the book, and it's so amazing that I love her writings all the more now.. While browsing about the book and the author, I came across this exclusive author's interview, which is quite nice (Link at the end..)

It's interesting to note that she came up with some of the stories in this new collection nearly a decade before.... authored 'The Namesake' in between and now actually completing those old stories!! 'Hema and Kaushik' is a trilogy in this new short stories collection, which she is referring to below...

Lahiri: It began in a staggered way, with Kaushik and Hema. The first of the stories in that series, "Once in a Lifetime," is a story from about ten years ago that I started and never finished. The characters had those names, though.
They were characters that first entered my mind about a decade ago. I thought about them, and I had a very vague sense of them and their world, their situations and their families. The earliest incarnation was the idea of the story of their two sets of parents who are at once very close and very different.
I was trying to write about Kaushik's family moving back to India and then moving back yet again, and staying with Hema's family. That was always the kernel, this strange couple of months in both their lives, in which they're all crammed into one household.
That was the idea, but at the time I never knew why exactly the family had come back; I hadn't yet figured it out. Those are the earliest characters in the book, and eventually, many years later, I returned to that draft (if you could call it that — it was just a few pages) and was able to work on it again and move forward and finish the story.
That's how it began technically, I suppose. Then I wrote The Namesake, in between, and then started up with some of the other stories. "Hell-Heaven" I had first started while I was writing The Namesake. Sometimes a story idea comes to me and I loosely write it or half-write it or quarter-write it. So when I was finished with The Namesake, I turned to these other ideas. I went back to Hema and Kaushik, and went back to "Hell-Heaven." The other stories just followed, one by one. "

And for all those people who think that the final-product of writing is usually those initial-thoughts that come into mind, then here's something to contradict that....

Jill: How much do you revise, generally?
Lahiri: That's really all I do. It's all a process for me of continued revision. I worked on most of the stories in this book for several years. When I finished some, and I published some, along the way, then I considered them done, but I still worked on them for a considerable length of time, and the ones I didn't publish, I continued to work on. Most of these stories were simmering for two to three years, minimum.

Read the full interview here