<Ethan> Hi, my name is Ethan Charles.

I think readers can expect to find some of the expected and unexpected I think this book holds a lot of adventure and twists and turns and excitement but also holds a good message that can be very beneficial.

I think it gives us insight into southern culture by showing a young man that is Asian American, growing up in a southern culture that is not his own culture, but trying to find his way throughout that culture.

I would say the author's writing style is exciting, filled with a bit of adventure, kind of leaves you wanting to come back for more each time you read the book.

<Holly> I'm Holly Jackson.

Join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established southern authors as we sit by the river.

♪ music ♪ Major funding for By The River is provided by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina.

For more than 40 years the ETV Endowment of South Carolina has been a partner of South Carolina ETV and South Carolina Public Radio.

Additional funding is provided by the USCB Center for the Arts, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB and the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

<Holly> Hi, it's another beautiful day here at our waterfront studio in beautiful Beaufort, South Carolina.

Thank you so much for joining us for By The River, which is our love letter to southern writing, bringing you powerful stories from both new and established authors and this season we are focusing on unexpected stories and writers, and we are joined here today with the author of Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian.

Thank you so much Sanjena for joining us.

And I always like to just start off with kind of the area and if you have any connection here.

And I hear that you grew up vacationing down the road, in Hilton Head.

So what's it like to be back?

<Sanjena> It's so nice to be back.

I grew up in Atlanta and I feel like for my family coming to Hilton Head as soon as you see the palm trees and the Spanish moss like my whole body relaxes.

<Holly> Yeah, I love that.

It's like we're here and all the worries are behind us.

<Sanjena> Exactly.

Yeah.

<Holly> Very good.

Well, we're happy to have you back in the area.

Of course, Hilton Head is a little ways away.

But same county.

So we're all right here together.

All right.

So this is debut novel.

This is a big deal for you.

I'm really excited for you.

Beautiful cover.

We're gonna talk about the cover in a minute.

But let's talk about what the book's about first.

<Sanjena> Sure, yeah.

So it's broadly - it's a family story.

It's an immigrant story.

It's a magical realist sort of comic satire bent and it's about two American teenagers.

They are second generation.

Their parents immigrated from India, and they're growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, and they really want to succeed in school.

They are obsessed with kind of getting into a good college, because that's what their parents want, right?

And they decide that they can get a little bit of a boost to kind of do better in that rat race of high school and they start brewing and drinking this magical golden potion that gives them a little bit of a boost.

It helps them steal the ambitions and energies of their classmates and their competitors.

And things go kind of awry from there.

There's some comedy.

There's some tougher stuff and the novel follows them through their teenage years in Atlanta and then picks up 10 years later, in California and Silicon Valley at the height of the tech boom.

And there are some cutaways to 1980s, then Bombay, India, and to the 1850s, California gold rush.

<Holly> Okay, well tell me what life experiences of your own that you had to bring into this first book of yours.

<Sanjena> Sure.

Well, I had been trying to write about the suburbs of Atlanta where I grew up for 12 years or so before I finally found this particular conceit that kind of let me back in but those suburbs are really, really interesting places.

They are full of immigrants and you will find like everyone from you'll find you go down these highways, these industrial highways, and you can just see the diversity in the strip malls.

You'll see like a Vietnamese strip mall on one side and then across the street up under la via a lot of sandwich shops full of Spanish speaking immigrants.

You'll find a Korean like cram school where people are studying extra math.

You'll find an Ethiopian restaurant and Indian South Asians are just one part of that and I grew up kind of splitting my time between a school that was majority white and the suburbs, where I was kind of in this like Asian American bubble.

And I really wanted to describe what that feels like what it's like to be both kind of surrounded by people like you and also feeling really different feeling both like the South is my home.

It's where I spent most of my life.

I live in Atlanta now, but also feeling like you belong here and also feeling like an outsider sometimes.

So that's the Atlanta portion.

And then I grew up, I grew up in the South, and then I moved to California in my 20s, which is a whole other Asian American experience.

And I also drew on my uncle's experience in Bombay, in the 1980s, for those little cutaways.

So he let me interview him for hours about his college experiences, which was a lot of fun.

<Holly> That's where I was going next.

I'm always interested in the research process and for you I imagine it was just simply talking to many of your peers, those who might have experienced the same thing you did of being kind of that outsider?

And did you feel like you were not alone in those feelings?

And what kind of help were they to you?

<Sanjena> Yeah, I actually did like three big categories of research.

There was definitely talking to my peers, which doesn't even feel like research, because it's calling up your friends and saying, what did we used to talk about on Gchat, or on AOL Instant Messenger.

So that was just digging through our old memories, but I talked to my uncle for research on the Indian parts.

Then, the book also deals with Alchemy, and California Gold Rush history and we also had gold rushes over here, in the south, and southeast.

So I did a lot of research into those kind of buckets of history and philosophy and religious history and used the alchemy research to kind of fuel the magical conceit, and then use the history to create this sort of like secondary plot of the past running through the present, which is something that I've always been really interested in - this book is in conversation a little bit with Robert Penn Warren's, All The King's Men, even though it's not the first thing that people think of when they read the book and that has this like powerful history running through it, and I always admire that about sort of, like ambitious, great American novels is that the past is kind of the present and looming over, looming over the present.

And so that historical component was a big part of the research as well.

<Holly> What do you hope are your main takeaways that your readers will get in there's so much diversity, of course, but what what do you hope?

What ideas do you hope to take away mainly?

<Sanjena> I think I write from such a private place where I'm trying to make sense of things for myself and so a lot of the book was me thinking about what being an outsider kind of does to you in your like, deep private soul.

It makes you sometimes ambitious.

It can make you like crave success or crave belonging.

It can be a big part of how you fall in love, which there's a love story between these two teenagers, that we follow through years.

And I was interested in sort of what that meant, like, in a deep, private way.

And so I think I am thinking so much about how I make sense of this, that I don't have time to think about a reader when I'm actually writing.

Now that the book is in the world, it's really exciting to see what resonates with people, and so I have a better answer for that, now that it's in the world and it seems like people connect to the love story.

They connect to the family story.

Some folks who recognize themselves in the pages, whether they're Indian American, or come from another immigrant background, they are reading it and saying, like, oh, I never saw my life on the page before.

But I've also been really touched to see that people who sort of demographically don't have anything in common with these characters.

They're recognizing these things that are just part of the universal human and American experience.

They recognize, I think, what it's like to want something to want to make a space and a home for yourself in this country and in this world, and I think they connect to a lot of the stuff around what success means.

Like this book, I think asks, I was asking myself and so therefore I'm asking the reader to consider how badly do you want to succeed?

What would you do for success?

And how does that warp you?

How does that drive you?

How does it create the best and the worst parts of yourself?

<Holly> When you were answering that, two words that came out that really stuck with me were you know, soul and private and kind of learning more about yourself?

So how was getting this all out the story all out on the pages and into a book?

Do you feel like you're you're different or you know more about yourself through this experience and tell me how.

<Sanjena> Yeah, I love that question.

It's certainly cathartic.

Maybe it's easier to say that, with the writing in the rear view.

I think when it's happening, I'm not like, Oh, I feel free, it instead feels just sort of torturous to get to the page, but I think now that I've articulated some of this, I just have a better sense of what those teenage years meant in particular, And what it meant to be growing up in the 90s and the 2000s.

In the south, in those suburbs, in America, I think I understand and can be kinder to like the past version of myself, who was insecure and scared and anxious the way all teenagers are, but who also just frequently felt really lonely.

I worried all the time that I would never really feel kind of at home, in this country, even though I was born and raised here.

And now that I've written this, I understand all the forces that were working on me to kind of make me feel not at home.

And now think I almost like a lot of minority writers in American history have done like, I think I sort of wrote myself into, like Americaness, which is, I think, one of the powers of American literature, in particular, that you can articulate your experience that might have been in the margins, and then kind of claim it for yourself.

<Holly> That's beautifully said.

At what point in life did you decide that you wanted to write a book?

<Sanjena> I wanted to write since I was maybe eight or so I was a reader first, like I think all writers.

I grew up reading these British boarding school books that my mom had actually brought over from India when she immigrated.

So they're like these, like dog eared, torn up, like some of them had been chewed by silver fish.

They're yellowing at the edges.

They're beautiful books.

And those were sort of - <Holly> Was this was this required reading in the home or?

- okay!

<Sanjena> I just loved them.

My dad would read my brother and me the tales of Briar Rabbit when we were going to bed.

So stories were everywhere in my house.

You couldn't tear me away from a book, and I think I started writing more seriously in high school because I started to love kind of grown up books, you know, starting to read To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Gatsby and All The King's Men, and Beloved by Toni Morrison, and these books that kind of helped me form my identity in high school became really important.

And I think by the time I hit college, I actually started doing journalism.

I found that, that was a great way to get out of my head and into the world and meet people and learn from other people's life experiences, so that by the time I came back to write this book, in my mid 20s, I was carrying, like a life of reading and a life of asking people questions.

And I think those two together are really important for any writer.

You need, like, the self and the introspection, but you also need the non-self, like, you have to be able to be curious about other people and empathetic and inquisitive.

And the combination of those two, I think, actually, was what got me to being able to say, okay, I can write a book now.

I can do more than just scribbling in a notebook, I have like a full body of something to say, I mean.

<Holly>From start to finish, what would you say was the timespan that it took to write the book?

<Sanjena> So this came together, either very quickly, or very slowly, depending on the time span.

I think the book was in me for somewhere between 10 And 12 years, if you look at like what I was working on, as a younger person.

<Holly> Were you taking notes and a certain book all along?

Was this in your head?

<Sanjena> Right!

I was trying to write these other stories, and they were completely realistic.

They were all realism and they very somber.

They weren't any fun to read, like, you wouldn't enter them and be like, Wow, I feel like I want to turn these pages.

There was no humor.

There was no life.

They were just, I was so serious.

And so I kind of had to put that aside, like 10 years of work I had to put aside, and when I came back to this, I came to it from the magical conceit, and from a little bit of comedy.

And once I found those two things, and found the narrator of the book, who is a 15 year old boy named Neil.

I don't know what it says that I found my sort of inner voice through a 15 year old boy, but that's for someone else to figure out, but once I found Neil's voice, the magic and the comedy - it came together in about 18 months.

I was in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I was lucky enough to have time and space.

They fund you.

So I had funding.

So I just got to sit in the cornfields and just work uninterrupted and it took about 18 months.

<Holly> That's awesome.

I'm very intrigued by this change of tone that you made.

Did you say 10 years of that sort of somber writing and when you say you put it aside, is that the old you and it's not coming back?

Or do you think that that writing might come back again?

And how do you - This is a lot.

I hate when people ask so many questions in one question, but I've got to get it out.

So to go from that to comedy, did you just say, Whoa, this is sad.

I need to make a change or did something happen in life, just the growth of you as a person?

How can describe it?

<Sanjena> Yeah, there's that quote, like, try comedy is tragedy plus time, or Mark Twain said, "Comedy is like the good natured side of a truth."

I think I just I got some distance from being a 15 year old, and there's nothing like angstier or, and more self serious than being 15 and you can get some distance.

and you can see that actually, some of those experiences were funny.

I think I just needed.

I needed space from the self I was trying to write about.

And once I discovered that, I realized that my voice is always going to have a little bit of a comic edge because comedy is my realism.

Actually, it's not.

It's not that I moved away from a realistic register.

It's that comedy helped me articulate the truth.

Magic also does the same thing.

I think magic is a way of de-familiarizing and getting distance from what like actual like physical material reality is, and finding a more true way.

People say you, you sort of betray the truth, and that lets you tell the truth, or the writer, George Saunders puts it, the doorway to the truth might be strangeness.

And so I think comedy and strangeness in some form will always be a big part of what I do, but the book is like not a straight comedy.

It's not a straight satire.

It's got a heart, I think, and so I think the sort of years of learning emotional realism, character driven realism, psychological realism, where your job is to just get inside the subjective experiences of people.

I think that means that hopefully, there are a couple of registers that the work has.

There's some tragedy in the book.

There's also comedy.

The two loving each other.

I think, for future work, I plan to play across realism and non realism.

But it's hard to say what will happen with my voice, you know, time will happen.

I can't predict what will what will change.

<Holly> That's right.

So it's clear that you put your heart and soul into your writing.

You've said that yourself.

Who is that trusted circle of people who you allow to be those first readers?

And how are you with their feedback?

<Sanjena> Yeah, I found a lot of my readers at the University of Iowa at graduate school, were all really different.

I think one of the great things about that program is you meet people who are doing things that are completely distinct from what you're doing.

You read them, and you're like, oh, like you're a descendant of Raymond Carver, and you're a descendant of Arundhati Roy, and you're a descendant of Toni Morrison.

And I'm figuring out who my sort of literary ancestors are, but the thing that we all have in common is that we can talk about books for hours.

We can talk about art for hours, and so when we encounter each other's work, we can try to meet it on the books terms, and try to say like, this is what I think you're doing, this is what I think you want to be doing.

And we've been lucky enough to be reading each other for about five years at this point.

And so you build up this trust over time, it becomes easier to hear, I don't think this is working, if you know that person thought something else was working like you, you know, the ego.

I think a great reader for a writer needs to understand just how fragile our egos are, and remind you, you know, I understand your intentions.

I've seen this work before.

This time, it's not working.

<Holly> Have you made any major changes based off some of those suggestions?

<Sanjena> I have thrown away, - I throw away thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words.

And sometimes I actually often make those calls myself, but I can make those calls based on the feedback someone's given me.

So one of my readers will say this, I missed your voice, like I missed your voice in this draft and you don't have to write everything like you wrote Gold Diggers.

You don't have to write everything like you wrote that one thing.

But there's something of you that's missing here, and then it's my job to go off and like, figure out like metabolize that criticism and turn it into something else.

Yeah, readers are essential.

<Holly> Some of those experiences you brought up, like the pressure of getting into the, you know, to the right college and that sort of thing.

How did your own family take to those those experiences that you shared in the book?

<Sanjena> I would never want to be related to a novelist.

So they have my sympathies.

They were incredibly good humoured about it.

I think they understand that what's in the book is not them exactly.

They might recognize some things that I took from real life, but also, I exaggerate stuff.

I change a lot.

I, the one thing that I tell them and tell everyone when they ask is the worst characteristics of all the characters in the book are my worst characteristics.

I don't think that we can write a character fully unless we put the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves into them.

So when I'm making fun of something in the book, I'm really making fun - <Holly> fun of yourself.

>> Yeah, <Holly> I want to make sure that we cover the cover, because when we were talking earlier, I was really excited about one part you shared.

So tell me about how the cover was chosen, and I know we're kind of I'm holding one and you've got one, and there's a little bit of a difference.

So I want to talk about this one in particular, and what's on the cover?

<Sanjena> Yeah, so the original is based on 1980s, Matchbox art, which was a kind of sort of kitschy campy art in India in the 80s.

And then when we got the paperback cover, we adapted it a little bit, a wonderful artist in Bombay, who they run a company that does these beautiful graphic designs, so they adjusted it.

We were talking about, like, what houses to include on the cover, because the concept of home is so important and I sent the artists just a bunch of sort of screen grabs of various houses in the neighborhoods that I grew up around.

And they ended up just kind of almost copying, the one that I grew up in, which is pretty cool to see on the cover.

>> That must be very special and it's to your family too.

<Sanjena> Yeah, it's really cool to see.

>> And then the title.

You chose it.

<Sanjena> Yes, I did, I get two titles pretty quickly.

They're organizing principles.

They're the concepts that sort of serve as the umbrella for the work.

And so the book is about gold.

There is a literal gold digger from the 1850s in the book, who is there in the California Gold Rush.

There are also references to the sort of like pop culture, valences of the term that it's a, you know, it's not a nice way to talk about someone, but there's a character who is called a gold digger, because she is a woman who married a man who has more money than she does.

And people talk about her in this condescending way.

And the book asks, I mean, aren't we all kind of dependent on other people, this is a woman who, really, she wasn't given opportunities as a woman growing up in India, in the 70s, and 80s.

and maybe she had to make the choice that she needed to survive to succeed.

And so the book is interested in like, all of the different sort of meanings of the term, which is always fun for me and titles.

<Holly> What's next for you?

<Sanjena> So I'm very superstitious.

I never talk about the fiction that I'm working on in progress, but I'm revising a draft of my new book.

and I'm working on the TV adaptation of gold diggers, which was optioned by Mindy Kaling's production company, and working on the TV adaptation has been really fun.

I get to revisit these characters.

It is - I've had enough time pass, since I first wrote it that I can see new ways to encounter them.

I think the best adaptations, they're not exactly the book on screen, they create something new with the book.

so figuring out totally what I want to do that's different.

Working with a really established screenwriter, who has taught me a lot about the form has been really exciting.

And figuring out like, what of the comedy and what of the drama will translate to the screen.

<Holly> That has to be really cool.

Just to bring them to life, truly.

<Sanjena> Exactly.

Yeah, I'm excited to see it on the screen.

<Holly> Well, this has been a great conversation.

I can't believe we're already complete with it.

You know, unfortunately, we have to go with the clock.

So the clock right there is boss and it tells us that we're done, but thank you so much for coming in.

It's really been a pleasure talking to you.

I'm just real thrilled to see where it all goes.

<Sanjena> Thank you having me.

<Holly> Thank you all for joining us here on By The River.

We love having you around.

I'm your host, Holly Jackson.

We look forward to seeing you next time right here, By The River.

>> When I was younger, Anita and her mother Anjalit Dayal were held in perfectly fine favor at my house.

Our two families mingled pleasantly as a latchkey kid whose mother was less prolific in the kitchen than Anita's, I often let myself into the Dayal's house to rummage around in the fridge.

The key beneath the watering can behind the azalea bush was mine to use.

Our parents, the four brown adults in a largely white subdivision collaborated to create a simulacrum of India in a Georgia County.

But over the past few years, Anita's father, Pranesh uncle had grown conspicuously absent, discomforting the other daysee mothers.

No one pronounced words like separation.

It was stated only that Anita's father was working in California, where he had founded a company with his classmates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.

The official reason for Anita's father living across the country while her mother remained in Hammond Creek was the daughter and a desire not to interrupt her schooling, which is why my mother was overtaken by...judgment.

When I came home at the end of May, weeks after the spring fling dance, with the news that Anita would be leaving O'Keefe Anokye High School And in fact, interrupting her schooling.

California, my mother said, I could almost see the RE/MAX Realty signs in her eyes as she dreamt of an open house, overdone chewy sugar cookies and fruit punch And information on the neighborhoods on the neighborhood's property values.

♪ Major funding for By the River is provided by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina for more than 40 years.

The ETV Endowment of South Carolina has been a partner of South Carolina ETV and South Carolina Public Radio.

Additional funding is provided by the USCB Center for the Arts Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB and the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

♪