The Internet Personified: Notes on the writing process

I'm writing again. WRITING-writing, which means I spend a large part of my days in despair. People say it gets easier with each book, but I think for me it actually gets harder. The vision of the Perfect Book dances around behind my eyes, and real life never lives up to that ideal. I keep thinking I've forgotten how to write, thinking about starting up a page actually makes my stomach knot. I love writing and I hate writing. I read--furiously, fast, sitting upright on the not-very-comfortable sofa in my study, and I think, "Oh I'll never be able to write like this, why do I even try?" Worse: sometimes I think, "My books are so much better than this one, why aren't I as popular as this writer?" That's dangerous, that kind of thinking. That sends you into a different sort of spiral, not at all conducive to writing, when you're grumpy with the world and with yourself. Over this next mountain, you think, will be my path to fame and fortune, and you know what? You're just looking at another mountain. There's no maps for these things. You do it because you have to do it, and without it you would be less... you.
But writing is my joy and my delight, in that way that something that is very hard is a joy and delight if you can do it well. Safe cracking, for example. I feel the same way when my sentences come out--word by word, stream of conciousness or painfully, but only with fiction do I feel this way. The non-fiction stuff, this memoiring that I do in this newsletter and the books I recommend and the mythology I break down, that's easy-peasy, it doesn't hurt, but fiction feels like I'm drawing from some deep well inside me? Do you know what I mean? There's this pulling feeling, like being a conduit almost for the story, letting the people come to life, letting the plot meander until you pull yourself together and start putting your people in order.
It was definitely not this complicated at age 25 when I finished the first draft of my first novel. Then I blithely skipped along, I wrote late at night, and I wrote between jobs, and I wrote with the confidence of a twenty something convinced that the world was just waiting for me to show them what was going on inside my head. Now we know: the world is not waiting. You get lucky sometimes. Your first book will be the one everyone talks about for a long time. Your seventh book is your seventh book, people are used to you writing now, it's not a Big Deal, just a Deal. You do it anyway, and your reward is that you have a book which you love and you're pleased with, and it may not be the Perfect Book, but it's close to what you envisioned, and you know the day you write the Perfect Book, you'll be done with writing forever.
I have a complicated relationship with Writing Me, it's so distinct from Regular Me. It's always been easy for me to write, I'm much more comfortable with a keyboard than I am with actual words spoken out loud, but there's a part of myself I only access when I'm writing fiction and making people up, maybe that's it, maybe it's because I have to be so many different people that the Me-ness, the Meenakshi behind it all, sort of fades away. When I die, my books will live on, and then in a hundred years, if books are still a thing, and if I endure, people will think they know me by my books, and we'll know, won't we, all of us ghosts, that that's only part of the story.
This week in One Step Closer to Fame and Fortune:
In this terrific article by Kaveree Bamzai on women retelling women and pulling them into the spotlight.
A new generation of women writers seems to have made a collective promise, however, to restore them to primacy, in acts as much of feminist scholarship as of great storytelling. Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, which retold the story of Draupadi, in 2008, was in many ways a forerunner of this trend of feminist forensics.
Now even as Hindi cinema excavates lost legends such as Padmavati, recreates more familiar characters such as Rani Lakshmibai in Kangana Ranaut-starrer Manikarnika and Aurangzeb’s accomplished sister Jahanara Begum in next year’s Takht, directed by Karan Johar, Indian publishing is speeding ahead with history’s heroines.
And NewsMinute interviewed me!
“Women's stories are so dismissed in literature and mythology. And as a woman, I wanted to know more about the characters just briefly mentioned, what did Kunti think about her husband clearly preferring his second wife, despite all she did for them, what did Draupadi feel when she learnt she was married to five men, despite no one mentioning this contract at her swayamvara, where her father and brothers could have fought on her behalf,” Meenakshi says in an interview as her second book in the series, The One Who Had Two Lives, hits the stands.
And this week in an extra long link list brought to you by trying to write my new book and procrastinating on the internet instead
Please don't go to these places in 2019: the Fodor's No List. (The excerpt below is from the 2018 list, but Myanmar is still on the list.)
But since August 25, the UN has labeled the human rights violations by Myanmar’s military as a “textbook case” of ethnic cleansing. What is happening to the Rohingya, members of a local ethnic Muslim minority, has been described as “horrific” and compared to the Rwandan genocide. In the past few months, 600,000 have fled to neighboring Bangladesh to a camp that is growing so quickly it can be seen by satellite.
No amount of worldly wonder could in good consciousness sustain our recommendation to visit Myanmar while the persecution of the Rohingya people continues.
Amazon tying up with local kirana stores in India to make online shopping a Thing for everyone.
At an air-conditioned Easy Store in the Worli neighborhood of Mumbai, customers leave their shoes at the door and line up to shop with the help of one of four agents sitting behind counters. “A sari for my mother, a lehenga skirt for my sister, sheets and blankets for the house,” says Hachnul Haque, a 28-year-old migrant from northeast India, who works in a restaurant kitchen for 25,000 rupees a month and is buying gifts for his annual journey home. Today he’s looking for a bangle for his aunt. The agent browses Amazon.in on a PC, which is also mirrored on a screen in front of Haque, as Haque takes photos of products with his phone and texts them over WhatsApp to his aunt so she can pick the one she likes best. “I’ve known the people here over a year and trust them,” he says, propping a leg up on a free chair. “There’s no tension in shopping this way.”
Four-four articles from the New York Times this week, which means you might have to break out incognito mode (not just for porn anymore!) to read them all
This story about gay penguin dads is just so... *heart eyes emoji*
First, as is the Gentoo way, they began to bow to each other.
They brought each other carefully selected pebbles for the nest they hoped to build together. If either had not been interested he would have rejected the pebble, pushing it away with a beak. But each admired the pebbles he was brought.
Ms. Lawrie described it as “consent.”
Then they started to sing. Standing close together, they sang to each other until they had learned each other’s voices.
Loved this takedown (ish?) but still quite gentle look at the Marie Kondo way
During her lecture, Marie demonstrated how the body feels when it finds tidying joy. Her right arm pointed upward, her left leg bent in a display of glee or flying or something aerial and upright, her body arranged I’m-a-little-teacup-style, and a tiny hand gesture accompanied by a noise that sounded like “kyong.” Joy isn’t just happy; joy is efficient and adorable. A lack of joy, on the other hand, she represented with a different pose, planting both feet and slumping her frame downward with a sudden visible depletion of energy. When Kondo enacted the lack of joy, she appeared grayer and instantly older. There isn’t a specific enough name for the absence of joy; it is every emotion that isn’t pure happiness, and maybe it doesn’t deserve a name, so quickly must it be expunged from your life. It does, however, have a sound effect: “zmmp.”
And an incredibly depressing story (sorry, but should I have to suffer alone?) on Japan's lonely deaths
To many residents in Mrs. Ito’s complex, the deaths were the natural and frightening conclusion of Japan’s journey since the 1960s. A single-minded focus on economic growth, followed by painful economic stagnation over the past generation, had frayed families and communities, leaving them trapped in a demographic crucible of increasing age and declining births. The extreme isolation of elderly Japanese is so common that an entire industry has emerged around it, specializing in cleaning out apartments where decomposing remains are found.
Also, this story about a random crochet bikini has a TWIST ending.
Ms. Irgit came to regard knockoff makers with rage. She seethed when confronted by Instagram images erroneously referring to impostor Kiinis as the real article, and even hired a company to scrub such posts of the #kiini hashtag. Ms. Irgit told a lifestyle website that “one of my big challenges has been trying to keep up with demand without losing integrity and hiring the right people to help without panicking. My biggest challenge right now is the copiers around the world. People say I should be flattered but I despise all of them. It just shows a very ugly face of humanity to me.”
This is the best fitness diary I have ever read.
Once home, I eat an ice cream as a reward for my run as if I'm seven years old. It used to be a 99 Flake but they've changed the recipe so now it's a Mars bar one. Then I eat popcorn as a savoury chaser. I'll write for a bit, take the dog out and then eat like a grown up – normally eggs on brown bread or soup. I go to a café in the afternoon to get out of the house and stop myself from ignoring my work and deciding I should paint a wall or make an elaborate recipe, and I drink mint tea like I'm being serious and pure while I'm writing. It's gross. Later, I'll have a double macchiato, which is delicious but really needs a cigarette and not the Juul I'm using as if I'm a US high schooler.
Why do I cook, asks this writer in this wonderful rambling piece.
My boyfriend was, at this time, in the middle of a long-distance affair I did not know about with someone for whom he would eventually leave me. He was the only one eating, fork moving with dependable loyalty from mouth to plate while everyone else consoled themselves with Christine’s garlic bread. Still, I am absolutely confident that as he ate his mind was hard at work scheming about when he was going to see this woman again. Whenever I think about that moment I feel such shame. I was so stupid to make that sauce, I was so stupid to be cheated on, and these failures were related.
Are we over superficial villainous bitches in novels? (YES.)
Every unhappy couple is now unhappy in exactly the same way, and every unhappy woman is a rotten-to-the-core fiend with the interiority of a Muppet (apologies to the Muppets). Adèle and its shelf-mates have been lured by the siren song of Bad Girl Literature — novels conceived entirely around the premise that women will read and share them with delight because the protagonists are naughty, or downright psychopathic, and that this represents a new horizon in literature.
In Bundelkhand, a lesbian couple is trying to make a life together against all odds.
Education, Pradeep believes, is responsible for his sister daring to get married.
“How many women in India are like this. 10 out of 100? But how many women get married to each other? 1 out of 10? Even women like them get married to men and stay married,” he said. “This is what I call abuse of an education. If she was illiterate, she would have lived alone, or lived unhappily with her husband.”
And finally, you may not see your friends that often, but the Instagram DM is the new way to stay in touch. (SAME.)
Let us momentarily set aside the understanding that our private lives are increasingly being controlled by a small handful of corporations, and enjoy a gratifyingly simple way of reaching one another instead. Watching my friends’ Instagram Stories is my favorite thing to do while hungover. I like to see what they’re up to. Unlike Twitter, the horrible garbage river I helplessly float along every morning until tapping out in self-defense, Instagram Stories feel like a waterfall of content I’m actually interested in. While most people’s Instagram grids are manicured, Instagram Stories allow for more unfettered, casual access to people’s daily lives—the kind of thing our friendships honestly probably didn’t require help with until we started getting more, well, global.
Have a great week!

xx
m
Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
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