Rahul Gherola

So those are Amitav Ghosh's beautiful lyrical novel called Shadow Lines and Ruth Ozeki's novel called My Year of Meats, which really stretches the ways we think about human beings into animal sentience.

And finally, the lovely retelling of the Antigone play by Camilla Shamsi in her riveting novel Home Fire.

So Gifty works in a Stanford University lab.

She's pursuing her PhD in neuroscience.

And in pursuing that, she is doing lab experiments with mice.

And she is doing these experiments to examine the ways in which they react to addictive substances and reward behaviors.

So in a sense, there's a

profound link between her interest in her PhD studies at Stanford with addiction and reward and depression and pain on the one hand in these lab mice and the state of human affairs and the state of the individuals in her own family throughout the different moments that we see this whole narrative stage.

So that is to say in the present and also in the past.

I think that she's... It's a mixture of feeling...

downtrodden by the way that she's been treated uh specifically by her mother so it's a very complicated relationship between um who i would say are the two main protagonists in this novel uh gifty and also her mother because i feel like they are character foils that construct each other so i think there's a lot of yearning and wanting to belong wanting to be validated by one's parents and i can um and i can certainly relate um as a um first generation uh being born in the united states after my parents immigrated

There's a huge feeling that you have to be better than and belong in a way that really reflects to your parents that you're the best that you can be.

And there's even a part in the novel, a passage where she talks about needing to be as brilliant as possible.

And I think that the other construct with that is not just about migration.

I think it's also gendered.

As a woman of color in Huntsville, Alabama, growing up there, and then in the competitive

male-dominated labs of the Bay Area, one needs to be the best they can and try to prove that you're better.

And even though she says, mentions that she didn't want to be pigeonholed into the so-called model minority, in some way she has to capitulate to it.

Well, he ends up, a doctor ends up prescribing him OxyContin for what might be considered a minor injury, and he ends up, well, should I give it away or...?

Okay.