Tara Roy

[00:00:00]

[00:00:00] Laura: Hi Tara, welcome to What's Your Next Podcast.

[00:00:03] Tara Roy: Hi, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:06] Laura: So happy to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:00:10] Tara Roy: I was born in India and traveled the world because that was just my dad's job. We lived in a bunch of different countries, including South Africa. And I found myself with a degree in classics and not quite knowing what I wanted to do next once I graduated school. And so after that, I was.

Like, I would like to be a transcriber. novelist in the English countryside, but this doesn't seem like the quickest career path, and my father's Asian, and he was like, well, absolutely not. And so then I looked at film and television, and I've built myself a career as a TV executive, but that novel bug never quite left me.

My cousin is a novelist, my grandaunt was a novelist and [00:01:00] I have a new book coming out, my debut. It's called The Magnificent Ruins in November.

[00:01:05] Laura: So I love this. So how did you balance writing books? Because I don't know if this is your first book or maybe your 10th book, and this is the first one that gets published. What was your process of like writing the book while having this busy career? 'cause I'm assuming working TV is not as, it's not as, it's not a lazy girl job.

There's more to it. And so how did you were able to balance two and both.

[00:01:29] Tara Roy: I would give a lot for it to be a lazy girl job some days. But you're right, no, it isn't. Think to write, you can never stop, right? And so I never did stop. But I was fresh out of high school and didn't quite know what I wanted to do next. I worked in the Indian theater for a while and wrote plays that were eventually performed in the UK and in India.

I wrote a short story called 8C, somewhere along the way that [00:02:00] won a prize, the Rick DeMarinis Prize. In graduate school at Columbia University, even though I was taking I was there for a producing degree for film and TV, I ended up taking several writer's classes And out of one of those, it was called Other People's Secrets out of one of those came my novel, the genesis for what would become my novel.

And I think the first part of that answer is that I never stopped writing. I just, did it alongside other people. And I couldn't not do it. So I made time for it. Right now, I have a career that I've settled into at a routine that, I'm talking to you very early in the morning. I usually wake up very early in the morning, right, and then go to work.

But it hasn't always been quite so routine based it has been about snatching time wherever I can in between graduate school, taking another class, taking, doing something late at night, waking up really early and just getting it done.[00:03:00]

[00:03:00] Laura: yeah, it's a it's, it's prioritizing the things that matter for you. It's probably like a creative escape to from the mundane of the daily tasks and just gives you that little breathing room, but same time prioritizing and it's very easy to just set it to the side because it's like we got we're so busy.

We got too much going on. But You know, obviously you have a work product that shows that it's worth the time, even if you didn't have work product, even if you just did it for the sake of doing it, it's still like, it's just as important for your whole being.

[00:03:33] Tara Roy: Yeah, for so many years, with novel writing, it is that you really don't know, I mean, I have a second book now, and an agent, and a, and, It's a different process and even then there's the constant fear of who's not going to like it, are we going to get to publication? But with the first one, with the debut the one that we're here to talk about, it took me seven years of writing into the void, let me tell you.

You don't know if [00:04:00] anyone's going to read this, if it matters to anyone outside of yourself it's just you and your laptop. So, you really have to like the doing of it. Laughter.

[00:04:11] Laura: So let's talk about The Magnificent Ruins, which is, a simple story of someone who inherits a house and it's just comes back to town and sees. Their life unravel in some ways and, and experiencing from a millennial, perspective what is it like to come back to your past and confront your family and all the different secrets?

I'll see a little bit of pitch.

[00:04:36] Tara Roy: Okay so The Magnificent Ruins is about Lila, who is your average millennial, makes complicated choices about her career, her friendships, her lovers. She lives in Brooklyn, and she's a rising books editor. One morning, Lila wakes up to discover that her beloved paternal grandfather is dead, and he lived in [00:05:00] India, and he's also left her the enormous family mansion.

The only catch is that Lila's mother, who she's estranged from, as well as her grandmother and a whole host of relatives, still live in the house. When Lila goes back, she must confront much more than paperwork. She's Got to come to terms with, the secrets that have lain buried in the house for decades.

And she also has familial loving reuniting to do that's not always pleasant or easy.

[00:05:34] Laura: Yeah, I think it's amazing. It's a very like, sometimes you wish you were like, okay, generational wealth, you inherit a house, and then all the great things, but then it comes with the baggage of whether the secrets, the family, the expectations, the maintenance costs. Whatever it is, there's some baggage.

And I think it makes such a photograph for storytelling because it gives you kind of like this place of like how to [00:06:00] conflict and how to unravel the story. How, what decisions, what choices will you make? And if you were in her shoes and having this opportunity to not only heal, but see time. grow and face new challenges and let go of the life that you left behind.

It's such a really great ground for a story,

[00:06:21] Tara Roy: yeah, I mean, you kind of hit, and I've talked about the book a bit, but you've kind of hit on really what is the core of it, which is that the house and its various problems become a canvas for the family and their various problems, and, neither is easier than the other, but both are so intertwined Lila also, for me, it was really important to talk about.

What multiple definitions of home mean for an immigrant Lila is really caught between things. She's caught between Brooklyn and Calcutta. She's caught between a man in Brooklyn [00:07:00] and a man in Calcutta. She is caught between generations of handling trauma in a specific way. She's caught between her mother and her grandmother.

So it really was a trying to at every level juxtapose the past and the present, in a specific way.

[00:07:22] Laura: Yeah. I think that's like fascinating, especially as an immigrant. It's gonna be I actually grew up in Puerto Rico and I moved to the States in my, my, for college. And it's funny enough, like I'm in my forties now and I'm looking at my experience, even though I'm not a typical immigrant that, Puerto Rico is Puerto Rico's commonwealth, and it has different things, but it's a culture shock from one place to the other and how to assimilate, especially the U.

S. is such a hard place to assimilate. There's an expectation that you're just like, you're just supposed to do this and then coming back home and you're like, but you're different. And that the idea, like you have spent [00:08:00] some time outside of it and then coming back and trying to adapt and seeing how much the world has changed, too, because, Your idea of what home used to look like 20 years ago, five years ago is very different from what it is now.

And so it's, I think it like jumping, like living in both worlds and trying to find your identity, how to merge those identity into who you are. It's a challenging process.

[00:08:28] Tara Roy: Yeah. I mean, you must then, very intimately understand it. what it means to sort of, when I'm in India, I feel more American than I could be, could feel, that I am. And when I'm here, I feel more Indian

[00:08:46] Laura: Yes.

[00:08:47] Tara Roy: Ever. And so I think, being from two places is a very valuable thing.

But for all of those people, understanding what home and identity means is [00:09:00] kind of like a lifelong exercise.

[00:09:03] Laura: Yeah, I think it's a fascinating thing. I love that authors are writing about these experiences and Sparks experiences from first generation to even just people who recently, move and stuff like that and to share voices that You know are reflected in today's society. And at the same time, from the millennial perspective, because as millennials, we have a different, we were told one thing and we realized very quickly or very slowly that the life that we were promised is very different than what we live.

And the choices that we are making are very different from our parents choices, like very narrow. And we have a society. set of baggage that our parents didn't have, and so I think it's like, it's how do you combine it all together? And I'm so excited for this book because I think it brings another voice for that experience of an immigrant, but experience [00:10:00] of a millennial and immigrant and the experience of.

DZI, yes, as we're told, generation wealth will be great. But then the reality is like, actually, there's a laundry list that you got to deal with.

[00:10:13] Tara Roy: Yeah. And I wanted to tell something specifically from that millennial perspective, because it is also a generation, like we're a little bit on, on either end of the spectrum. Right. And I also did want to write an entertaining, fun read that was also an examination of the cultures of silence. And see, you would understand that, sort of inhabit each society and we end up having prejudices, and that lens is really re examined when we go back or come back,

[00:10:48] Laura: so I'm very excited. The manifesto is, will be out on sale by the time this episode airs. So feel free to download it or buy it or get the audio book [00:11:00] and listen to it. So, Tara, what kind of books do you tend to read?

[00:11:05] Tara Roy: literary fiction for the most part. I was making a list for you and I realized that there are commonalities between my favorite books, but I would say that I'm pretty open genre wise. I don't read a lot of hard boiled pulp, but outside of that but, I have read the occasional graham grain, but outside of that, I think pretty much everything.

[00:11:27] Laura: So do you have any books to recommend or listeners to pick up?

[00:11:30] Tara Roy: Yeah. Let me

[00:11:32] Laura: Take your time. Oh

[00:11:35] Tara Roy: up. Okay. Okay. The first one, it's, most of my favorite books I've read are a long time ago. This one I read fairly recently. It won the Booker and before it did, I had read the author's first book. It's called The Beasting by Paul Murray and it is a family saga.

There's a specific [00:12:00] incident that is the crux of the novel, and it has it is a beasting that happens to someone. And you'd think that would be an innocuous incident, but what ends up happening is that completely unravels the lives of the families concerned in such an interesting way, which then the author, telling it from various points of view, sort of brings together and collides.

And it's one of those twisty, turny family sagas that just hurdle towards a final finish. But you're like, so invested in these characters that you are along for the ride. It's also a very intimate portrait of the 2018 financial crisis in Ireland. And told from various class perspectives as well.

But I would say all of that aside, these family members, I know them and I'm not Irish, every [00:13:00] single one of us do. And it just is so richly observed and very fun as well.

[00:13:06] Laura: my gosh, I'm adding this one. You have me a family saga. And you have me a people that I probably didn't really

[00:13:12] Tara Roy: Yes.

[00:13:14] Laura: So, yes.

[00:13:19] Tara Roy: Me too. All of the above. Second book, and this is where I laugh to myself because of the overlap also by another beloved author. She owns a bookstore called Parnassus. Ann Patchett. This was her seventh novel, Commonwealth. Have you read it? Okay, well, then, I mean, God, a single incident in this case, not a bee sting, but a an illicit kiss sort of unravels the lives of two families and creates a blended family, something I'm I have a a half sister, and, in this case, It examines the nature of what [00:14:00] step siblings look like, what real siblings look like, what second wives and first wives and coming from a blended family myself.

It's very interesting when those things happen. And again, it starts with that one kiss and sets in motion a series of events that upends the lives and brings about reveals and transformations. And in the end, it's so uniquely structured that in the end, I did gasp with the final understanding.

But more so, I didn't want them to go away, which is the hallmark of a great novel in this genre. So, definitely get Commonwealth by Ann Patchett.

[00:14:40] Laura: yeah, I think I'm Patrick writes like so beautifully and so like connected, like there's something about her right and it's immersive that's just, there's just like this beautiful story that you just like you just go for the ride, you just like go for it, and I'm kind of like I listened to [00:15:00] Tom Lake and the Dutch house and those are like, yes, that narrators are Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, but it's a writing that just like transports you to that place or that setting and to that family and to that story.

And it's yeah, I get it. It's like a small incident can actually unravel the story. And it's just beautiful. So,

[00:15:22] Tara Roy: Yeah, there's that opening scene with all those oranges and the gin and the afternoon and, the opening scene where the first incident happens. And I'm just like, I'll never forget that. I, it felt like I was there, it felt like I myself was mildly tipsy and worried about what might happen next.

[00:15:42] Laura: Yes.

[00:15:45] Tara Roy: Oh, and the last one this is a book that has, the author has maybe been the most influential author to my life. I've read him since I was a teenager, like a lot of Indian millennial [00:16:00] kids. A lot of Indians overall. His name is Vikram Seth. He is widely celebrated as one of the finest writers, Indian writers writing in the English language.

There are several. He specifically writes in this lyrical, fluid prose. He's also a poet that just has always it's very spare yet lyrical and the writing itself is just such a gift. His first book A Suitable Boy was a, another big heartrending family saga and really such a fine literary masterpiece was recognized around the globe as that.

But this book is I would say a little lesser known. It's called Unequal Music. And it's about a classical violinist and his first great biggest love. They meet in Vienna. And years later, they have parted ways and years later, he sees her on a [00:17:00] bus and he can't he must get to her. He must, he is haunted day and night by the memory of her, but things have changed as they do decades later.

And it is one of the most beautiful, often painful, yet in that good pain way love story. It's a love affair for the ages, especially for millennials and people in their thirties and forties, because it is, One, all too clear a reminder of the great what ifs of our lives, but also the choices that we make at these crucial turning points, who are we at the end of college? Who are we at the end of grad school? Who are we at the pivotal points for our careers? And what are those choices that we make, they are going to have a ripple effect on the rest of our lives. It's just such a beautiful story.

[00:17:57] Laura: Oh my gosh, I'm adding this one for [00:18:00] sure. Yeah, I mean, just trying to explore this idea of, love and like, in a different space. And so, yeah, I am adding this one. I'm bumping this one up. So,

[00:18:13] Tara Roy: and it's a really, I think you'll get through it really quickly. Because he writes in that deceptive light prose way. But it is, it cuts really deep. Let me tell you, say

[00:18:26] Laura: There we go. So Tara, tell us we can find you online.

[00:18:31] Tara Roy: that again.

[00:18:31] Laura: Tell us we can find you online, your website.

[00:18:33] Tara Roy: Oh my website is my first name and my last name, sonantararoy. com that's n a y a n t a r o y dot com. I am on Instagram as tararoy. T A R O I. I'm occasionally also on Twitter and Threads. Threads is new and feels friendlier and nicer. So I'm there as well. And please reach out.

I'd [00:19:00] love to hear from you.

[00:19:01] Laura: Awesome. Thank you Tara for being in the show.

[00:19:04] Tara Roy: Oh my gosh, it was such a pleasure. I can't wait to run into you some,

[00:19:08] Laura: Yes