| Shinie Antony interviewed by Amita Basu |
“I wish I didn’t feel this urge to write. Writing is painful in every way – physically, emotionally, spiritually. Why does anyone write? I think to reach into yourself and find that truest truth within, what only you know. Nothing fun about it.”
Shinie Antony is a writer and editor based in Bengaluru. Her books include Eden Abandoned: The Story of Lilith and Barefoot and Pregnant. She has compiled the anthologies Hell Hath No Fury, Boo, Why We Don’t Talk, An Unsuitable Woman, and co-edited exObjects: The Art of Holding On, Letting Go. She is the festival director of Bangalore Literature Festival and of Bangalore Poetry Festival.
We met Shinie back in October 2024, when we were a part of the organising team for the inaugural edition of The Mizoram Literature Festival. We spent a whirlwind two days filled with poetry readings, art in the park, literary debates, trying Zufang [1], and trading notes on the crazy and often chaotic behind-the-scenes work of organising a Lit Fest. We are really glad to carry our conversations further with this freewheeling interview, where Shinie talks about the universality of pain, gender politics, the three things in life that she considers superpowers, and why she enjoys editing way more than writing. She also lets us in on her reading and writing quirks, and her list of favorite writers.
[1] Zufang – Traditional Mizo rice beer.
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AB: Your characters often experience intense pain, but downplay it with humour. Denial is another favourite strategy. They seldom seem to lose self-awareness or to fully surrender to pain. This is all very true to life. In third-person narratives like When Mira Went Forth and Multiplied (2011) and The Girl Who Couldn’t Love (2017), do you see your characters as being the sources of wit, or is it the narrator who wants to keep things from getting too dark?
SA: Roo and Mira, or for that matter Nena and Lilith, to me they are all in varying degrees of pain, simply because that is the one thing life guarantees: loss and grief. But they are self-aware enough to understand that pain beyond a point is universal. I mean, we all go through the heartbreak of being dumped, as also losing someone we love. All these women are their own people, coming into that particular realisation of loss and coping with it uniquely in their own way. Some with rage, some with cunning, some with bad jokes. Murder too is not impossible. And really when I read back anything I have written I do not see any wit.
AB: The sexual revolution has been a boon in some ways, with women free to explore their sexuality and alternatives to long-term monogamy. Strides in gender equality at the workplace are also to be celebrated. But all this has created enormous complexities that many contemporary women struggle to navigate. Your fiction often features successful middle-aged women who nonetheless pine for love, or fall in love with unsuitable men, often with significant consequences. Do you see men and women making some kind of sexual peace?
SA: Oh, I am very hopeful about the new-age man. I see young boys today and detect no toxicity. This whole man-woman thing and how things are different for genders got me only as an adult when I went out into the world to work and woo. Everything I know is not necessarily first-hand. In fact, I was an idiot for much of my youth, thinking all men were feminists like my dad and that gender equality was a given. If male ego was the underpinning for many relationships earlier (and probably still is), the main issue has moved on to consent. It is still alive, this matter of female ‘yes’; look at the Gisele Pelicot case. Men can use, and women can be defeated by their longings – this could lead to a predator-prey situation. Sexual peace is possible if loneliness doesn’t impair our judgment.
AB: Mira Went Forth and Multiplied features Samundar “Sam” Shah, who can perhaps unkindly be called a man-child. He’s no longer young but he wants to quit his job to paint full-time. The reason I’m reluctant to call him a man-child is that the women in his life, his wife and his mistress, are also motably immature. It’s delightful to watch these very lifelike, often entitled or parasitic characters bungle their lives and then try to patch things together. What are your thoughts about Sam?
SA: Sam is symbolic of the kind of men I used to know. Spoilt rotten as a child for being male. And then pursued by women in the matrimonial arena, for his looks. And then he wants to have it all. He does say at some point in the book: ‘Perishables like love and lust are best refrigerated in marriages.’ I think this book, written by a much younger me, was an exploration of extramarital affairs – what makes people risk an entire marriage for something so whimsical and will-o’-the-wisp? But now in the age of polyamory and throuples, I can see how the thrill of cheating has been deflated. Traditionally only men were identified with high libidos, them with their chinna veedu and Harvey Weinstein instincts. But now women are equally out there, actively pursuing passion.
AB: The ticking of the female biological clock plays a role in some of your writing. There’s also the famous rise in female libido during middle age. These two biological forces often blind, with lust, female characters in your fiction who seem at first to be invulnerable. With in-vitro fertilisation becoming commoner, and women deferring or even foregoing childbirth – are you seeing these dynamics shift?
SA: Being single is a superpower. Being child-free is a superpower. Ageing is a superpower. Put all this together and you come to Superwoman. I am so hysterically happy about women of the youngest generation. No pressure to marry, they are protected by their mothers who had to go through all the idiocy of trusting and lusting wrongly. The dynamics have shifted, and thank God for that.
AB: Quotations from Shakespeare appear in some of your work. In The Girl Who Couldn’t Love, Rudraskhi’s father is a Shakespeare scholar. What other writers do you admire?
SA: Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee, Madhavi Mahadevan, Mani Rao, Anil Menon, Jeet Thayil, KR Meera, Arundhathi Subramaniam, VJ James, Perumal Murugan… The list of fabulous Indian writers is long. I do not reread any book – I vividly recall what I have once read. Two recent books, given by my students, that I liked are: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and I Want to Die and I Want to Eat Tteokbokko. My favourite writer is probably Yoko Ogawa, for consistently writing books that are slim and lethal.
AB: Your writing never shies away from intimate subjects. Sam, for instance, dislikes using condoms, whether with his wife or his lovers. Men worldwide are notorious for cavilling at condoms – leading to the head of Durex, for instance, spending decades trying to make condoms less cumbersome. Have you observed attitudes to contraception shift over time?
SA: Contraception unfairly was always female domain. Especially in the films I watched while growing up premarital sex was such a female-shaming event that the women invariably killed themselves. Nothing was ever the man’s fault. Yes, legalising abortion, making the Pill available over-the-counter etc. changed female lives, gave them more agency. But this is an area where constant improvement is organic. The very arrival of household appliances, for instance, levelled the domestic battlefield. Detergent ads no longer feature women. Ladles are no longer an extension of lady hands. But I am still not very sure about what benefits women the best when it comes to men. Celibacy sounds damn attractive to me.
AB: Sexual abuse often has long-term effects on your characters – on the victim, the perpetrator, and bystanders. Your fiction shows unresolved sexual trauma distorting relationships and making future, consensual intimacy much harder. I remember an India Today survey some years ago reporting that about one in four Indian children have been sexually abused. Are you seeing the narrative of victim-blaming change?
SA: Childhood is traumatic. All of life is spent resolving childhood trauma… Adulting is all about coming to terms what whatever happened to you when you were small – and it need not be sexual. Everything is so violent in that period. A lack of attention, feeling alone, not belonging to a peer group… We are more aware of it now, that even in utero experience counts. Once you are a parent your life changes irrevocably. It is not just childhood, it is also motherhood that is traumatic.
AB: There’s perhaps no word harder to define than “taste.” Given that you write extensively and frankly about intimate relationships – how do you navigate this question in your own writing?
SA: Characters define their own sexuality. There was a time I provided a nice tasteful bedroom and a lovely bed to my protagonists but they’d be like I am frigid, I am impotent, high-five! Then Roo came along and she was very insistent about her sex life. I never consciously thought how she should be or shouldn’t be. She was pretty independent and even uses men. Lilith and Nena, my latest heroines, fiercely occupied two extremes. One sexually driven, the other asexual. Both, I do think, are normal states.
AB: Relationships between sisters, or women with sisterly bonds, feature prominently in your writing. In The Girl Who Couldn’t Love we have Rudrakshi and her friend Ela, two single women in their fifties who have been close for most of their lives. This relationship nonetheless turns out to feature great deception, resentment, and vengeance. In Mira Went Forth we have Delta and her friend Stuti, who experience petty jealousies or judgments towards each other’s lives; and between Mira and her sister Maya, no love is lost. Interfemale rivalry and jealousy play key roles in fiction as in life, but so do close, supportive female friendships. Do you see interfemale relationships changing as women gain autonomy in various spaces?
SA: Women do go rogue on women occasionally, making interfemale relationships shaky, political and a power play. But I see women as the best support system for women. The sisterhood is calming and invigorating. In Eden Abandoned, Lilith pays a tribute to her pal Naamah: “Somewhere out there is not the man you are fated to meet and mate with, but female kin. Blood sisters, soul sisters, big sisters, little sisters, spirit sisters, flesh sisters… sisters.” Female interactions shape us constantly.
AB: Do you edit other writers besides Chetan Bhagat? How does editing yourself differ from editing another writer?
SA: Yes, I do edit others. I am a fiction editor. I love editing way, way more than writing. With the latter the burden of the story is on you. While editing is such a treat! You come in like an interior decorator, saying maybe these walls should be painted a darker blue, the sofa turned towards the window etc. Your feedback can be taken or not. Either way you are just speaking from your heart. For my own work I would like to mention two editors. Renuka Chatterjee of Speaking Tiger, who has tirelessly worked on The Girl Who Couldn’t Love and more recently Can’t. And Abhivyakti Singh of Hachette who edited Eden Abandoned, and gets me totally.
AB: At what stage of writing a book do you begin thinking about who your audience is? I’ve read a range of responses to this question, from writers claiming they only ever write for themselves (but nevertheless publish), to writers carefully targeting a specific market segment, to writers who write with one close friend in mind.
SA: I write for no one but me.
AB: You’ve edited several anthologies. Hell Hath No Fury (2024) offers tales of female vengeance ranging from voodoo to murder-suicide, a posthumous Cain-like marking of the murderer to an artist turning the lover who spurned her into an art installation. How do you go about assembling an anthology?
SA: I love every anthology I have put together: Why We Don’t Talk, Boo, An Unsuitable Woman, Hell Hath No Fury, and The Art of Holding On, Letting Go. The stories in all of them are extraordinary. Writers like Shashi Deshpande, who has contributed to two out of these, are brilliant of course. Even newer writers have been a pleasant shock. Stories by K. R. Meera and Kanishk Tharoor in Boo, for instance. The editing is two-fold. First I do give feedback to the writers, then the editor from the publisher’s side steps in. Anupama Manral did a lot of work on Hell Hath No Fury.
AB: You’ve published with Penguin Random House, Rupa, Speaking Tiger, Om Books, and Hachette. How do the editing and marketing processes differ across these publishers?
SA: Since I am in the editing field myself, I try to never interfere with any editors. They are doing their job. As a writer who has been edited, I do remember a couple of instances when I listened to editors against my will. It still rankles.
AB: You’re a founder and organiser of the Bangalore Literature Festival, which just had its 13th edition. You’ve talked about how Bangalore is a city of readers, how vibrant participation from younger readers is at BLF, and how BLF honours Kannada literature and the city of Bangalore while also being a global event. How has your experience with BLF changed over time?
SA: In the beginning I was a shy backbencher, intimidated by all the authorial brilliance I got to witness firsthand. As the years passed it has been a joy to be a part of the organising team. 2024 was particularly vibrant in terms of author participation and the backend preparations.
AB: A random question to finish on: tell us three weird aspects of how your mind works.
SA:
- I am always counting the letters and words in my sentences at the back of my mind when I speak. And I want them to end in even numbers.
- I love thin books, novellas. Like Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa.
- I spend a lot of time parsing sentences in my writing, to make them as brief as possible. After I have done my best, if by chance I can cut another word, I feel like I have won the lottery.
Follow Shinie Antony: Amazon, Goodreads, Times of India, Twitter
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Amita Basu is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose fiction appears in over 75 venues including The Penn Review, Bamboo Ridge, Jelly Bucket, Phoebe, and The Bombay Literary Magazine.
She is the Interviews Editor and Columnist of MeanPepperVine.
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