Rahul Gherola

Well, he ends up becoming addicted to opioids and ends up, I won't say exactly what happens, but he ends up losing his life over that.

And it actually has a devastating impact on all the members of the family, arguably the most on his mother.

Well, the mother is very grief stricken by his passing.

She falls into a very deep depression and what could be called mental illness.

And she ends up, you know, we actually meet her in the beginning of the novel because she is so unwell that she has to basically come to live with Gifty.

in Gifty's home so a lot of this narrative unfolds in the present where the mother's actually staying with her daughter while her daughter's going each day to work to the lab and so we get as readers a very interesting cross-section of the ways that the dynamic of reward and depression

and substance abuse operates between the work that Gifty's doing for her doctoral studies at Stanford on the one hand, and the way that these themes reflect not just in the present tense with her mother's sickness and deep depression over the death of Gifty's brother, Nana, but also the pretty jarring absence of their father, Shinjin Man, when things start to go to a ride due to the intense racism that the family's experiencing

in the United States.

So there's so much interwoven in terms of the complexities, and it really is.

It's a very meditative and quiet novel.

It's deeply intense and psychological, and it delves deep into the human heart and the mind and the ways in which one constructs and complicates the other.

And in that sense, it's really quite different from Jesse's first novel, Homegoing.

The church seems to have an just absolutely overwhelming impact on the family.

I would say primarily the mother, but Gifty says that around the time she was in college, she starts to move away from

the prescription to church and there's even one point in the novel where she says it took her a while and then she suddenly realized she wasn't always carrying a bible or didn't have a bible at her side constantly and what i thought was very interesting about this turn in the novel is she actually around that time meets a very interesting character and this this is the novel taking us back in time to her undergraduate days at harvard and she meets an interesting non-religious highly political character a queer character

named Anne, and one of the interesting ways that the church ends up being tempered or juxtaposed with Giffey's deep religious outlook is this queer relationship that she starts developing with Anne at the same time that they're doing mushrooms together.

So it's almost like there's a movement from these two extremes that in one way or another, although it's not OxyContin and it's not opioids,

There's a certain sense in which even our protagonist, who is alive and narrating the pain and the science of addiction and rewards, there's a way in which she too oscillates back and forth between, on the one hand, religion or dependence or addiction to God, and on the other, this awakening that's at once sexual and also a subscription to science versus religion.

I think so.

And there's such a beauty that I think also comes up, if I could just sort of weave this into the structure and the narrative form of the writing itself.