I was curious what food means to you as a writer. Then, when her boss stops paying her, she stocks up on chicken sandwiches from Wendy’s and eats white bread with mayonnaise. When she’s doing well, she eats out, and the descriptions of her meals are really evocative. Sneha’s fortunes seem to be reflected in the food she eats. The simple reason for that is it mirrors how I and most ordinary people experience the world. I wanted money to become a source of suspense. I wanted the reader to feel the sort of false sense of security that Sneha herself does. But I also wanted to talk explicitly about money and the material realities of the protagonist’s life-and all the characters’ lives, really-to form part of the ticking clock of the novel. So you have what I hope reads as a hot, will-they, won’t-they queer romance and love story. One way in which All This Could Be Different does that is through suspense around love. So it mattered to me to create a narrative that was suspenseful. In some ways I wrote it for the version of myself that worked hard and long days, and the only time I had to read was on my commute after work, and I needed books that could hold my attention. It mattered to me at a political level, for example, that the novel felt juicy and accessible.
I wanted to write a novel that could hold a few different types of politics within it. Could you talk about your decision to write about paychecks, rent, being able to afford groceries? Those kinds of details are pretty rare in a lot of contemporary fiction, but they’re pretty central to our actual daily lives. One of the things I like about the book was the way you include precise details about Sneha’s work and her financial reality.
“If there is an overarching gesture within the novel,” she says, “it is toward this idea that the world as it is is a thing that is made-and thus can be unmade.” Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Mathews recently spoke with Kirkus over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. In a starred review, a Kirkus critic writes that “Mathews achieves what so often seems to be impossible: a deeply felt ‘novel of ideas,’ for lack of a better phrase,” calling the book “esplendent with intelligence, wit, and feeling.” The novel traces Sneha’s emotional and psychological growth it also describes, in exacting detail, her deteriorating financial situation. Mathews has a luminous prose style, both rhapsodic and deeply grounded in the mundanities of daily life. Her relationship with Marina, her girlfriend, grows tense. For a time, things seem to go well: Sneha works hard, eats out, dates. 2), Sneha, the daughter of Indian immigrants to the United States, moves to Milwaukee to begin her first job.
In Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut novel, All This Could Be Different (Viking, Aug.
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