On Writing Styles

Let me tell you something. As a kid, I wasn’t particularly fussy, but yet someone with peculiar tastes. God bless my mother, how she put up with my myriad moods is a mystery to me.  It was many years later that I was going to learn about Wilde’s popular and my mantra for life – Be you, everybody else is taken. But somehow even at the age of two, it quite influenced me.

I grew up with this natural urge to be different. When I started to write, the urge took the shape of a hungry blistering monster. Today, as a writer, the hunger drives me. But it isn’t just fantasy, it’s the need. And for many years, I did not know how to be that. How do you be different in an ocean-full of a zillion writers out there?

In the fall of 2005, when I read Jhumpa Lahiri for…