Mansi Shah

Mansi Shah writes novels centering Gujarati characters that speak to generational differences across the Indian diaspora, and she's the author of the acclaimed novels The Direction of the Wind and The Taste of Ginger. Shah was born in Toronto to Indian immigrants, raised in the midwestern United States, and is now based in Los Angeles. She left her long-time career as an entertainment attorney in Hollywood to travel the world and write full time. She loves to cook and is often experimenting on new culinary creations that blend Indian flavors with other cuisines.

Shah's new novel is A Good Indian Girl.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

A Good Indian Girl is the perfect title for this novel and really sets the tone for the story. Coupled with the cover, which features an Indian woman with a smirk, the reader can intuit that this is going to be a story that challenges the stereotypes of what is expected of a “good Indian girl.” The story starts off with Jyoti, who is a 42-year-old woman who finds herself divorced and estranged from her parents after she was unable to conceive the child that her husband so desperately wanted. She’d given up her chef career to focus on having children, so she approaches the second half of her life having lost everything that she thought she was supposed to have at that stage of her life. With no obligations, she spends the summer in Italy with her best friend, Karishma, a fellow social outcast from their conservative Gujarati community. Through the experiences of Jyoti and Karishma—and a lot of pasta and Chianti—the story changes the narrative of what type of life a good Indian girl should have, and is grounded in the universal themes of reinventing ourselves after loss, learning to live for ourselves, and the significance of found family.

What's in a name?

Jyoti Shah is the quintessential Gujarati American woman, so I had to make sure she had a quintessential Gujarati name. In my novels, I showcase names from the Indian diaspora, and in A Good Indian Girl, I wanted to make sure I highlighted a name that is often mispronounced in North America in the hopes that others with the same name might have a slightly easier road ahead if more readers are exposed to it. And her last name Shah, which is the same as mine, was chosen not because she and I are similar, but because in the Indian community, the last name is often a signifier of the caste and region of India that a person comes from. Shah is an incredibly common last name in Gujarat, and many of the cultural aspects of my life—and Jyoti’s—are specific to that subset of Indians, so that is why the majority of my protagonists throughout my novels have the last name “Shah.”

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I don’t allow myself to start drafting until I have a clear sense of the beginning and ending scenes. In a story about a chef in Tuscany, I knew I had to start the story with the reader being able to taste the food, and the truffle gnocchi dish described on the first page is from an actual restaurant in Florence and sets the tone for the mouthwatering story ahead. Given the focus on food in this novel, I made sure to include recipes for the Indian-Italian fusion dishes that Jyoti creates. I won’t give away the ending to this story, but so far, in all the novels I’ve written, my ending scene has remained unchanged from the first draft to final publication.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Jyoti was an interesting character to write because while we have cultural aspects in common, the essence of her personality and life experience are not the same as mine. At her core, Jyoti is a people pleaser. She spent most of her life doing what she thought would make others happy: her husband, her parents, her community. She never stopped to think about what she wanted, including whether she wanted children for herself or to give up her career, or whether she just subjected herself to a decade of torture trying to conceive to satisfy the dreams of someone else. I haven’t struggled with people pleasing to the extent that Jyoti has, and wouldn’t say that trait is part of my core personality, so it was very interesting to get into the mindset of someone who is driven by different goals than I am. While I have never been a chef, I do share of love of cooking with Jyoti, and those aspects of the story were incredibly fun for me to write because, as authors, we get to live out other lives through our characters and words—without the late restaurant hours.

Visit Mansi Shah's website.

--Marshal Zeringue