Jhumpa Lahiri Lets Meaning Find Her

“I see very little when I’m writing,” Jhumpa Lahiri tells me. We’re speaking over Zoom. In her square on the screen it’s 5 p.m., and a warm July light filters into the Rome apartment where she has lived on and off for just over a decade. Over the course of our conversation, a light breeze sometimes lifts her long hair; she is serious, with a precise attention to her language, occasionally circling back to revise a word and then explaining her reason for the edit. “I mean, I’m kind of right up against it and I don’t understand what I’m doing most of the time. I don’t have a sense of what it’s supposed to mean.”

Take “The Steps,” from her new collection, Roman Stories (Knopf). Arriving in the middle of the book, it follows a number of characters who use the same set of outdoor stairs each day—each has their own section entitled by their descriptor: the expat wife, the mother, the girl, the screenwriter—inspired by, Lahiri says, “a staircase that I live next to.” Not a famous staircase, but a significant one in that it connects the class-shifting, sprawling neighborhood of Trastevere, below, with Monteverde Vecchio, full of early 20th-century villas and the American University of Rome, above. “The staircase is an uneven gray, but in the middle there’s a colorful section—faded by now—of alternating red and yellow, to commemorate the important victory of a beloved soccer team. Here and there, trapped in porous stone, tiny lakes of moss and weeds,” she writes.

“It’s part of my quotidian consciousness and an amazing open theater, if you will,” says Lahiri. After we finish speaking, she plans to meet a friend at the bottom of the steps before they go see Barbie. “And then as a writer, I was always observing the variety of life, lives, ages, experiences, perspectives, and it felt to me just so blooming with stories.”

She started writing the story not long after she baffled friends and members of the American literary community by not only moving her family to Rome, but abandoning English—the language in which she won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies—in favor of Italian. (Since 2015, Lahiri has written and published first in Italian and then, doing most of the translations herself, in English, a process she wrote about at length in Translating Myself and Others. She translated Roman Stories with Todd Portnowitz.) “The Steps” began as a vignette about a mother working as a child’s caretaker while separated from her own children. “It was,” Lahiri says, “one of the first very short stories I wrote in Italian.” After setting it aside for nearly a decade, she returned to it in the summer of 2020. She had been back in America teaching creative writing at Princeton University when the pandemic put a temporary end to her freedom of movement; when she and her family were able to return to Rome, a mandatory two-week quarantine in their apartment brought greater significance to the steps, which became their primary point of contact with the outside world: Friends stood on them and passed her a newspaper; she’d call up a produce seller from the nearby piazza who would deliver lettuce, potatoes, and fruit in a bag handed over their gate. For entertainment, Lahiri would watch people go up and down. “I had the idea of representing a day in the life of this staircase.” It was only after she finished writing it that she began to see themes emerging from her accumulation of images: the upstairs-downstairs class polarity, the way the steps encouraged communion and detachment.

Much of Lahiri’s work explores these tensions of belonging and dislocation, of connection and separation: Interpreter of Maladies (which a New York Times headline on a Michiko Kakutani book review described as “Liking America, but Longing for India”), the 2003 novel The Namesake, and the 2008 story collection Unaccustomed Earth largely center on Bengali immigrants and their families making lives in the United States. Though Roman Stories, which takes place in and around Rome, also focuses on newcomers and so-called outsiders to Italy, Lahiri has stripped away names and nationalities. Characters refer to “foreigners,” “my country,” “their kids,” “they,” and “us.” There are instances of violence and xenophobia, but also tenderness. A couple visiting the city mourns the loss of their son, years earlier; a man entertains an infatuation with a near-stranger at an annual party; a family flees their racist neighbors; the teenage daughter of a vacation home caretaker observes a family on holiday. (Given all the family ties, it feels fitting that as we speak, first her husband and then her daughter appear from some unseen room, notice her on-camera conversation, and disappear again. The collection is dedicated to them, along with Lahiri’s son: “For Noor, Octavio, and Alberto: ten years later.”) The book’s apt and beautiful cover is an Ian Teh photograph of trees experiencing “crown shyness,” an adaptive phenomenon in which the leafy crowns, rather than touching to form a contiguous canopy, remain distanced so that when viewed from below seem separated by channels of sky.

The final story, “Dante Alighieri,” was also the last story she completed in the collection. In it, a woman attends the funeral of her mother-in-law, and over the course of the service recalls a teenage romantic entanglement in America with a young man who wrote her a love letter, signing Dante as his name; the woman went on to become a scholar of the poet and build a life in Rome. “Dante was not one of the authors I ran to try to read when I felt that I was a competent reader in Italian,” Lahiri says. Instead, she waited until some preternatural sense told her she was ready—a kind of sure-footed wandering in the dark that to me seems similar to how she writes. Of her process, she says, “If it’s meant to mean something, it will mean something.”