Apoorva Tadepalli
Apoorva Tadepalli writes about literature, history, cities, work culture, and how we relate to each other and the world; a selection of her published writing is available on her website. She’s worked as an assistant editor for Lapham's Quarterly and a fact-checker for The New Republic and Guernica, and she received her M.A. in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University's journalism school. She splits her time between Queens, NY and Bangalore, India.
Stargirl, like all books by Jerry Spinelli, is a perfect companion for a shy middle schooler struggling to be liked, and to figure out how far it’s okay to go to be liked. The eponymous protagonist comes to a new school eager to make friends, and confused by how her fellow classmates oscillate from hating her quirky habits to loving them to hating them again; no matter how much she tries, she just can’t seem to read the herd’s wildly fluctuating ideas of coolness, and she isn’t sure she wants to anyway. I kept mostly to myself in middle school, reading, and after reading this book I remember the strange sadness at realizing that weird people really can fit in if we want to, but that it comes with a cost, and if we fail that’s okay too.
In his advice to young writers Zafón wrote that “you should only become a writer if the possibility of not becoming one would kill you…I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died, or worse.” I read Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind in 2009; I was seventeen and just beginning to toy with the idea of writing myself, and for a long time the characters in this novel—their passion for literature that haunted them, seemed to eat them alive—felt like my closest friends. They are physically, sometimes in spite of their best efforts, pulled into the world of stories; Shadow was the perfect affirmation for a teenager (now an adult) for whom the stakes of literature often feel higher and real than those of life.
Like millions of others, English is my second language but also, in many ways, my only language, the language I love and dream and think in. Everyone knows that English is the language of the oppressor, but this postcolonial fable about a schizophrenic young Indian woman attending an English finishing school in India—and conducting seances and love affairs with Sylvia Plath, William Blake, and DH Lawrence—captures perfectly the feeling of this illicit love, of being drawn, in spite of ourselves, to stories that are not “ours.” “How does she know what my country is?” the woman asks in Mad Girl’s Love Song by Rukmini Bhaya Nair of her British English teacher. “We did not belong neatly to Asia, Africa and Europe; we have read ourselves into her country…we were in love with the forbidden language.”
The first city you live in after you move away from home is always special, but there is something about Bombay. I moved here in 2013 and immediately felt it on my skin, under it, unable to scrub it from my being. “I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay,” Thayil’s narrator says at the beginning of Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil, an unforgettable novel and a hazy fever dream of memorable characters roaming through the city’s gritty downtown, lounging around in its opium dens, and telling their stories. The city itself is dreaming in this novel, lost in its own memories, and once I had read it I would enter fever dreams of my own, walking the streets and seeing them juxtaposed with the memories.
In Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis, a girl runs away from home chasing a boy. It turns out to be a mistake: he’s unreliable, he misleads and misuses her. But she quickly changes track on her journey. She’s now chasing a story, a storyteller, and she’s drawn as much by the boy and the story as by the pull of the sea, the way the hours and days and nights on the beach bleed into each other, the charming characters she encounters there. It’s been a long time since I traveled solo, but when I read this novel in 2016 I had just finished a long trip and could immediately relate to the seaside feeling—dense, salty, delirious—of realizing that there are stories behind every shack door, under every moon.