Nanda Reddy, A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL: A Novel
[0:00]Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Book to Zibi.
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[0:45]Nanda Ready is the author of A Girl with an girl with an girl, a novel.
[0:49]This is the Zibi publishing book.
[0:51]We are publishing this book with my own publishing company.
[0:55]I'm really excited about this debut author.
[0:57]Nanda is amazing and I fell in love with her book.
[1:01]Nanda Ready is a guy and he's American writer and former elementary school teacher.
[1:05]She immigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was nine years old and grew up in Miami,
[1:09]Florida.
[1:10]She loves visiting off the grid places, hiking, and painting with watercolors.
[1:13]She currently resides in Reno, Nevada with her husband and two teenage sons.
[1:17]A girl with an girl with an girl is her first novel.
[1:20]Welcome, Nanda.
[1:21]Thanks for coming on totally booked to talk about a girl with an girl with an girl with an
[1:25]a girl.
[1:26]Congratulations.
[1:27]Thanks for having me.
[1:28]Of course, as we both know, this is a book that we are publishing at Zibi publishing.
[1:32]And so I had the great honor of reading very early draft, the earliest.
[1:37]I don't know what draft that was that you sent in to now where it's all polished and ready
[1:41]to go.
[1:42]Tell listeners about what a girl with an girl with an girl with an girl is about.
[1:46]Give us the, give us the rundown.
[1:48]Well, I mean, the elevator pitch is that it's about a woman who hides her identity from
[1:53]her husband and her family and she has to come clean when her sister finds her and readers
[2:00]learn that she arrived to the country without papers and that she changed her identity
[2:07]multiple times to survive a really difficult childhood.
[2:10]So the story interweaves the present day with the past heavily on the past so that readers
[2:15]understand why she was forced to change right in a new or felt forced to change right
[2:20]identity.
[2:21]And this is your debut novel.
[2:23]It is.
[2:24]It's so exciting.
[2:25]It is.
[2:26]But it's not like the first thing I've ever written, of course, because all writers
[2:30]we have these shelved novels right before one of them feels good enough.
[2:37]So how at this point in your life, why did you decide to write this book and how did
[2:41]you come up with this particular idea?
[2:43]So I've talked about this, I with Corey actually when we were on the Buzzbooks panel
[2:48]that inspiration for this specific novel arrived in like an aha moment.
[2:55]I was on vacation with my family in Costa Rica and a tour guide just kind of made the
[3:01]honest assumption.
[3:02]This happens fairly often that I was from India and yeah, I didn't correct them just
[3:07]because it didn't really matter in the moment and it doesn't really bother me and I am
[3:11]of Indian descent.
[3:13]But I thought of like the story popped in my head, a woman who kind of hides her identity,
[3:19]lets people's assumptions shape what she kind of presents to the world.
[3:26]And I knew in the moment that she would, I don't know, take on multiple identities.
[3:31]I don't know.
[3:32]That's how the story arrived and it rattled in my head for a while before I actually
[3:37]wrote it.
[3:38]Yeah.
[3:39]I love that.
[3:40]How all novels get built.
[3:42]The required rattling.
[3:46]Take us a little bit more through some of the identities because this book spans continents
[3:51]and cities and all sorts of different perspectives and has a lot of trauma built into it.
[4:01]Take us through even the geography of the book.
[4:03]Right.
[4:04]So the story, you know, at first you meet Maya and she's an adult woman with with
[4:10]two boys and a husband and a family life that seems perfect and her husband, she gets
[4:18]a sweater from her sister and she knows that it's time to come clean because there's just
[4:22]a sick, she has breast cancer and so you go back to the, to go back to Guyana.
[4:28]The first part of the novel is set in Guyana and you meet Maya as 12 year old sunny on
[4:34]the day that her life changes.
[4:38]She is very close to her deaf older sister who she's served as like a interpreter for her
[4:44]whole, her whole life and you meet her family.
[4:48]You kind of get a sense of the setting like what Guyana's like for a gosh, a working class
[4:55]quote unquote family in that in the 80s at that time.
[4:59]What a home would look like and what their lives might might look like and you also get
[5:06]a sense of the kind of desperation people felt at that time to leave Guyana.
[5:11]Guyana was a very, very, a new democracy at that time.
[5:14]It was 15 years old.
[5:16]It just gotten its independence from Britain in the late 60s and it, yeah.
[5:22]So people had this at the time, there was a lot of people in the country and there was
[5:29]a desperation to leave.
[5:30]And so massive amounts of people left and a lot of them had family abroad in different
[5:35]places that sponsored them, which is how I arrived, but if you didn't have that option,
[5:39]a lot of people hired smugglers and or tried to, I mean, it was very expensive.
[5:45]And in this situation with, with Sunny, sort of a, a gift or a, a, a, a, landed them
[5:54]on their family's lap in that the situation arose that seemed almost perfect to send
[5:59]her abroad and to get quote unquote a foot in the door.
[6:04]So I, I wanted to capture that sense of just urgency that, that desperation people have
[6:10]to migrate for economic reasons and complicated reasons because that's still going on
[6:16]today.
[6:17]That goes on all over.
[6:18]I mean, people of course migrate or, or forced it to, to leave for very track, like
[6:25]traumatic reasons like war, but a lot of people leave because of these economic forces
[6:32]and that desperation is something that I don't think people truly understand.
[6:37]I was, and it's, I don't know if I really captured it, but I was trying to capture that
[6:40]feeling of desperation that the family had because they are a loving family, but they,
[6:45]they end up sending Sunny on this journey and putting her in, in, in harms way.
[6:52]And you know, that wasn't their intention, of course.
[6:55]And so, and then to continue she moves to, she comes to, she comes to Miami and she's
[7:02]on this, she's at this flower farm where she is with to also undocumented Guyanese people
[7:11]who are abusive and are, are difficult personalities so like they were, they're difficult
[7:19]people.
[7:20]I wanted to paint them as, as real people because while they are not good, quote unquote
[7:28]good people, they were also acting out of like a lot of desperation, but the monster
[7:33]and the story is this guy that feels like he doesn't have a lot of control in his world
[7:39]because he doesn't have papers and he doesn't have control in his jaw like job situation.
[7:45]And so he exerts that control on the easiest victim like who is Sunny, who arrives in
[7:51]his life and on his wife.
[7:52]And I, I don't describe that process in his mind explicitly, but I hope it comes across
[7:58]in the way it was written and the way he speaks and what he says and how he behaves.
[8:03]And so that people can sort of understand how like monsterish behavior kind of grows out
[8:10]of, out of that, yeah, out of situations.
[8:13]And so there are some hard things that happen in the novel, but I also wanted to show like
[8:18]the light side of, quote unquote, light side of things in that, you know, when you, when
[8:24]you immigrate to a new country, there, you're a fish out of water and so many things are
[8:30]just the things that are like that are common in everyday just to someone here was new
[8:37]to you.
[8:38]And like seeing a microwave or like having pizza for the first time or the differences
[8:44]in schools and music and TV shows, there's a lot of the 80s built into the book because
[8:52]she, she moves here then and I also moved into this country in the 80s and, you know,
[8:58]a lot of those things like the pop music, the TV shows and the foods, the, the zeitgeist
[9:04]of that time was what I like, like studied to assimilate and she does the same thing.
[9:13]And so there's a bit of that and then, of course, she changes and Sunny becomes, she
[9:20]becomes Nina because they call her that from the get go.
[9:24]But then she chooses to become Nina because of a traumatic incident.
[9:28]And then later on, she chooses to become, quote unquote, Cindy to reinvent herself when
[9:36]she wants to, to kind of free herself from, from all of the abuse and from the monster
[9:42]in the story.
[9:43]And then she goes through a stint where she is a stripper and she's Cynthia.
[9:49]And I don't show the, all the, the years between Cynthia and Maya, but you do, you
[9:56]do understand why she becomes Maya and when she becomes Maya.
[10:00]and there are flashbacks scenes to show how she kind of grew into that identity as an adult.
[10:08]So it's almost like you had to write like four main characters.
[10:13]Yeah, because there are different ages, different places, different, I mean, obviously deep down,
[10:17]it's the same person, and that's the whole point of it, but you really had to do, I mean,
[10:21]this is not a light lift to let me put it that way. No, I did. It was like writing four characters,
[10:28]but again, there's that thread of the one person that runs through all of it, and I hope,
[10:34]but I mean, I hope it comes across that way. I feel like early readers have gotten it, and it
[10:40]was never felt jarring to move from one identity to the next felt seamless. Yeah, but it was a
[10:46]little bit like writing. And I certainly didn't mean to imply I didn't work, it worked very well.
[10:52]I was supposed to be a compliment. Tell me more about immigrating here in the 80s,
[11:00]and even what in your own experience can inform some of the more painful writing in this book.
[11:06]I mean, there was a, it felt very authentic. Where did this all come from?
[11:11]Well, I mean, I want to, what I told you, the inspiration, but really I wanted to write a story
[11:17]about identity, and especially with as related to being an immigrant, there's, whenever anyone
[11:25]moves to a new country, and I'm sure it works the other way too, but if someone moves to America,
[11:31]there's this realization that so much of what you know and who you are is kind of wrong,
[11:38]quote unquote wrong, like, and to fit in, especially if you're moving at a formative time,
[11:42]like Sunny does like I did, everything you've ever known, and every, like the way you behave,
[11:47]the way you spoke, all of that is wrong. It doesn't fit in, it doesn't work, and you have to kind of
[11:54]erase a lot of that and hide a lot of that. And so there is a lot of her wanting to fix her speech,
[12:03]and like working on it and thinking about the right way to say things, and so you see her
[12:08]working through all of those issues, and then learning eventually had a code switch, had a, like,
[12:14]put on a new skin and embody someone who's accepted and to, and hide the part that isn't,
[12:22]and there's also that sense of feeling like that is inferior, and I wanted that to come across
[12:29]in the way that language was her initial language when she first arrived was perceived by the
[12:36]people around her, and the way she saw it too, as inferior, I wanted to show that without actually
[12:41]making the language inferior, or come across that way on the page, what I wanted to respect it,
[12:47]and, but then show how it was perceived, and so that is actually, that's, you know, from true,
[12:55]it lived experience in that, you know, I, that even though the scene where someone corrects her
[13:01]when she says three, you know, I said three, when I, when I first came to America, that's how
[13:07]you said the number three, three, and I remember, I'm like my whole body reddened when someone
[13:15]was like, it's not tree, it's three, and I don't think they meant it to like be
[13:20]disparaging, or maybe they did, I actually do remember that moment, it was a cousin,
[13:24]and they think they meant it to be mean, but it, that was that moment where I was like,
[13:29]I have to, I can't speak, I shouldn't speak, I'm not a lot, I don't know how to speak.
[13:35]So I leaned into little experiences like that, that I had as someone who assimilated to
[13:42]write the book, and it's not like I, I mind it where I brainstormed a bunch of things,
[13:47]they just kind of sort of came out naturally because I was writing an immigrant, and all those
[13:52]Sonny is not me, you know, all of us, novelists, we mind from our lives, and so there's a great
[13:59]amount of us that just gets imbued in the character, and yeah, like that's that's one of those
[14:06]examples. What about her sister being deaf? Yes, so I didn't set out to write a deaf character
[14:13]or deaf characters, you know, again, when this story came to me, I didn't think about that,
[14:18]but as soon as I sat down to write it, she had a deaf sister, and you know, and first in the
[14:23]back of my head, I thought, this is a bad idea because well people think this is my actual sister,
[14:28]and as I wrote it and Rosie was nothing like my sister in the end, you know, I decided to keep it,
[14:36]but I thought, you know, it's interesting, the representation of course was matters, and since I
[14:43]have this experience, I can write it, but the things like with her deaf sister in the beginning,
[14:52]when you meet her, she's feeling this desire to like be separated from her, that I just kind of
[14:59]grown tired of kind of always being attached to her, and they also have this very rudimentary way
[15:05]of speaking to each other. That's all from lived experience when I was a kid. I was younger than
[15:11]my deaf sister, but I did serve as her interpreter, and I was actually placed up two grades
[15:17]to be her interpreter, and I felt attached to her in that way, not by Lee, I think I really
[15:27]leaned into maybe small feelings I had, and I made them huge in the novel, and I of course
[15:34]fictionalized all of everything, but yeah, it's the mining, those small feelings, you know,
[15:41]that are not things we're proud of, like wanting to just like ditch her, although I never really did,
[15:47]that I think makes the novel honest, because, you know, it comes from those honest, ugly places,
[15:57]where I was a mean kid, but where you had like a mean kid feeling. And what's your relationship
[16:06]with your sister now? My sister is in Florida, she lives not too far from my parents, and I just
[16:13]saw her, she came here to visit for Christmas. We have a great relationship, but because she's
[16:19]hearing impaired, and I don't speak, and I'm not proud of this, I don't speak,
[16:25]sign language fluently, it's a very trans, like, surface. We can only go so deep in conversation,
[16:32]right? And so it's, I know how she's doing, she knows how I'm doing, and that kind of thing,
[16:37]and I just need something, but I think with the whole deaf culture, what I wanted to do with
[16:43]this book was to sort of portray a utopia that doesn't exist for most deaf families, and
[16:52]for deaf people, because I thought, why not, right? Sunny's having enough problems that show some
[16:58]good. When in the 80s, particularly, there was a huge push to force deaf people to speak,
[17:05]so I remember when my, and of course my sister, she didn't have hearing aids in Guyana at all,
[17:10]and she didn't get them until she was 11 when she came to this country, and she didn't actually
[17:15]start learning sign language until even later, like 13 or 14. So she arrived to that language
[17:23]but there was, I remember she'd come home and she'd, like, touch our throats because she's like,
[17:26]that's what they told us. We have to do to learn to speak, like, to feel all the vibration,
[17:31]and then, like, try to mimic it. And there was no push to try to get the families to learn
[17:37]sign language until it was like, maybe I was a senior or junior in high school, and she was too,
[17:45]and she's like, oh, they're doing this program, and they want us, but by then it kind of felt too late,
[17:49]I think. We're also busy. My parents had two jobs, and it wasn't. So this, the whole,
[17:56]the idea of, like, a whole family speaking sign language and making such a, it's not an effort,
[18:04]but making it a seamless part of their lives is a utopia that does not exist for most deaf kids,
[18:12]like my sister. You know, our circumstance was a little different that we arrived later,
[18:18]so she wasn't brought up here, but we didn't. My parents don't speak sign language. My other
[18:23]sister isn't speaking sign. We all tried. It's not like I don't know any words. I know the alphabet,
[18:27]and I can, but I'm not fluent. And it's funny, the words that stick with you, like, I'll always
[18:33]know cookie, and, you know, there's just some silly words that'll stick with your mother,
[18:38]father, all the simple words. We all know those, but the fluency is just not there because it's
[18:43]a whole other language, and you have to have that effort. I told my sister that, you know,
[18:50]obviously she knows that there's a deaf character in here, and it's inspired by her
[18:54]actually multiple deaf characters, and I told her that they all speak sign language to each
[18:59]other, and it's sort of perfect, and she's like, that's great. But yeah, she, she was not like
[19:05]you lied. Yeah, she said, she's excited. She's really, really proud. She's super excited that
[19:16]there are deaf characters, and that there's representation in the novel. And I worked really hard to,
[19:22]I mean, I don't speak sign language fluently, but I was around it enough, and I'm around her enough
[19:28]to understand the syntax of it, and how that all works. And I've read a number of books by deaf
[19:36]people to help with that, as I was writing a lot of that. Fantastic. Well, I found that part of the
[19:45]story so compelling. So I'm very glad you put it in, and it's great for everybody who might not have
[19:52]personal interactions with someone who's deaf to learn a little bit more about it, and to,
[19:56]you know, have that be a character. I just love that. And
[20:00]It's so meaningful to know it comes from such a personal place.
[20:02]I appreciate it. No, thanks.
[20:04]It definitely adds a whole dimension to the story that I feel like it
[20:08]it enriched the whole thing.
[20:10]I agree. I agree. What should the reader take away?
[20:14]All of us kind of have our different parts, right? And like our, you know,
[20:18]there's all that talk about how ourselves completely regenerate.
[20:21]We're actually kind of physically different people every 10 years,
[20:24]whatever it is, science, blah, blah, blah.
[20:26]What do we do with the information that like inside all of us,
[20:30]we hold maybe not as extreme, right?
[20:33]As as your characters, but character.
[20:37]But that different world sort of live in all of us.
[20:40]Like where do we go from there?
[20:42]Well, yeah, I mean, I, I just kind of hope that readers think about identity
[20:47]as they read the book and their own,
[20:49]maybe even like just the dimensionality of it.
[20:52]I mean, we all do this mini micro code switching.
[20:56]You know, you're, you're the podcast host right now and you're totally different
[21:00]person, not totally different person, but you're different with your kids
[21:03]and you're different with your parents.
[21:04]And often when we return to our childhood situations with our parents and siblings
[21:12]and cousins, aside of us comes out that feels reminiscent of our childhood.
[21:20]Do we become the big sister, the little sister, or the middle sister, the quiet one when
[21:26]in our everyday lives with our friends, we may not be that person.
[21:31]So I hope, you know, readers kind of see themselves mirrored in this book in some way,
[21:37]even though this situation is, is so drastic and not at all like anything anyone's living.
[21:45]I do feel like sometimes stories like this that are so specific
[21:49]are the best ones to mirror because you go so deep into someone's brain
[21:54]that you see the echoes of your own like personal self.
[21:58]So yeah, I'm hoping readers take away the complexity of identity and of their,
[22:05]think about their own and and think about the way we sometimes pigeonhole people
[22:09]and we don't allow them to change or to like we don't think about the multiple sides
[22:15]that people have when we meet them. I love that. I love it.
[22:19]Nanda, thank you so much. This book was so immersive. I loved it from first reading
[22:25]and it was quite complicated to pull off and you completely did it
[22:30]and we'll make all versions of of ourselves relate.
[22:34]So thank you and thank you for trusting us with your book and yeah, very excited.
[22:40]I appreciate it. Thanks so much to be.
[22:42]Okay, thank you for publishing it and having me.
[22:44]You're welcome. Okay, bye bye.
[22:47]Bye bye. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[22:50]formerly mom's don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend,
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[23:00]Thanks so much. Oh and bye the books.