Shiela Sundar‘s debut novel Habitations is a deeply moving story about motherhood, immigration, and loss. It quickly became a favorite book about motherhood that falls in line with Nightbitch, The Nursury, and The School for Good Mothers.
What makes this book so exquisite is how subtle and supple Sundar’s writing is. She crafts keen dialogue where you feel you’re in the room with her characters talking. She also allows moments of joy and grief to coexist without pushing one out of the way. The world she allows readers to inhabit is informative both emotionally and intellectually.
I caught up with the author with a good old-fashioned phone call to ask about how she tackled motherhood, movement, and grief on the page and what inspired her to write this book.
AV: Describe the book from your perspective. Cut out the publicity copy. How would you tell people about your book if you were pitching a friend?
SS: I would say it’s a book about a woman grieving the loss of her younger sister, and she’s also somebody with sociological ambitions. But I think more fundamentally, a sense that is what informs her sociological traditions, that she wants to be part of a better world. Wants to want to be a part of recreating the order of things. So it is motivated by that. She also has grief that to her is one that is so intensely private and so hard to look past and just cannot get out from under.
The book is about a woman who is weighed down by loss but also desires not just to live on her own terms, but to live in a world that is ordered in a way that is more just. She’s in pursuit of the latter without fully realizing that it’s the former that this weight on her that she needs to get out from under.
AV: Your book features a young woman who has moved abroad to study. Why did you choose this set up and structure?
SS: I think a lot about migration and movement. When I set out to write the book, I couldn’t quite imagine somebody who stayed put. That character was very hard for me to imagine on both an intellectual level and an emotional level. So the fact that she was a mover and that she was a migrant was just natural to me, and I think had I written, had some elements of the book change, that’s something that I would not have been able to untangle from the book that I had in mind, because that’s how I imagine people moving through the world. Those are the negotiations that feel most real to me, the negotiations that come from being a migrant. And so that was always going to be there in this book. I’m always interested in people moving and negotiating the politics and the wins and the losses of that movement. I’m always interested in understanding how people recreate home and the unanticipated joys and unanticipated pain of that process.
AV: Was moving and movement part of your life?
SS: I had a life of a love of movement. I had about 18 years that were static where I lived in the same home from the time of my birth to the time that I left for college. But I was raised by immigrants, and I was raised around the stories of migration. That was always part of my consciousness. I always had a sense of a place that I was living, was the place that I was spending time in for those years, and that I would eventually move, and I could move and move and move endlessly at any point, for any reason. The world is big and available to me and that was the perspective of a pretty privileged immigrant. My parents came over at a time when, for them, the world was opening up to people with their backgrounds. For a lot of inherited reasons, I had this sense that I too could move. I too had the freedom of movement because I had seen them do it so I too could.
I wrote the bulk of it during the pandemic and during the initial stretch of lockdown when everyone in the world was incredibly stationary. I also wrote it in the stretch of the world that was starting to open up a little bit when I was in New Orleans, so for about three out of the four years I spent working on the book, I was home. Home in New Orleans, and I wasn’t doing much else besides writing the book.
The first year of it, I was kind of managing the kids’ virtual learning, but also managing things around the house. My only movement was really between rooms in my home. But I think sometimes that those periods of stasis can be these years when we reflect on what movement and what our lives have meant in the years prior. The life I was living at the time when I really entered into the book, was when I was having a very domestic couple of years. I was doing a lot of just the labor of parenting and educating and living, and a lot of that, I think, entered into the later parts of the book after Vega’s daughter is born. But I was really homebound for much of the time that I wrote Habitations
AV: I know you just alluded to it, but I’d love to hear more about how being and home with family influenced Vega’s story.
SS: I was able to take stock of not just the opportunity that comes from moving. When I started to write the book, that was really what I had in mind. I kept asking myself what would it be like to just chase the next opportunity and chase the next the next question, the next research project, the next research question, the next urgent intellectual challenge.
That was when I knew that she was going to be somebody with a real craving for that kind of that kind of work but what I hadn’t really anticipated was how much she would reflect with a great deal of sadness every time she went to a new place. When I originally envisioned the book, I thought this is going to be about a woman who is so intellectually positioned to take on the world. As part of that, she has to get out from under this marriage that’s unsatisfying and stifling to somebody who’s not her intellectual equal, and she has to find her way in a world that’s big and dynamic and full of opportunity. That’s where all the joy is going to come in the book.
AV: One thing I am always really interested in is the art of capturing and writing grief. There is a lot of joy in this book, but you portray grief so incredibly well. How did you translate it to the page?
SS: In the very early sketches of the first drafts, I was just trying to write this developmental draft and lay it on the page. I had a better understanding of Vega’s intellectual self, much more than her emotional self. Her sister hadn’t yet entered the story. And when she did enter it, I really resisted it. I saw the possibility of this loss for her, and I felt like there was something about Vega that I didn’t quite understand before. I came upon this and I resisted it because it was the kind of loss that I just did not want to write about. I’m not drawn to the subject of grief. It terrifies me. The idea of losing somebody you love that much is not something that I want to consider in my own life. It’s not something that I wanted to deliver into the reading lives of my readers. When I did understand that this was the direction I wanted to take a novel and the direction that gave Vega a certain humanity, then I had such a hard time going there because that loss to me felt so unimaginable that I had to really work to imagine it.
I think there are people whose writing really shines when they have moments of proximity to their own journey and their own lives. I find a lot of challenge and joy in that distance, in that gap of being forced to imagine something that is outside of my own reality. Whenever she walked into a room, the first question I would ask was what does this feel like to walk in when you have this pain that you cannot shake and nobody in the room knows that you have?
My character came into her own in the 90s and the in the early, the early 2000s. This was a time when our stories were not made public, but you can keep these secrets quite private. The world doesn’t doesn’t force you to expose them. So she was never outed. And so this was this was something that she was able to keep entirely secret, even if she if she came to love people, you know, had moments where I was saying, well, this is what she should probably tell Helena.
AV: In addition to that storyline with her sister, this also is a motherhood novel. In recent years a lot of my favorite titles grappled with motherhood. Why did you want to write about motherhood?
SS: I actually think it might just be where I am in my life right now and that I have a hard time imagining somebody for whom motherhood is not either a force in their lives or looming in the distance. It’s something that I just kind of always knew that I would be a mother. Now that I am a mother, I know that there were years when I didn’t have children. But motherhood always, even in its conceptual form, loomed somewhere on the horizon. I knew that they would exist at some, someday, and now they do. And so I, I think about a lot of things being in relation to motherhood. I think that one day probably will write a book about somebody who is not a mother or a parent, but it is such a way that I look at the world through the lens of maternal love and maternal labor.
When I imagined the character of the projects that I’m working on now, she’s not a mother when the novel starts, but she becomes one. I think possibly when my kids are out of the house, I might be able to imagine a character where motherhood is not either a presence or a looming presence in in the book. But that’s not that’s just what I find really interesting right now. I find motherhood really, really interesting. I think the negotiations of it are interesting, the desire to assert yourself. And when you constantly have these people in the back of your mind, like there’s never, there’s never a moment when I’m not aware of the existence and needs of my children. That is and that’s sort of a weird place to be. It’s a very, very defining way of being in the world.
AV: What are books that helped guide you in writing about motherhood and all of the other themes in this book?
There were five books. Actually, I wonder if any of them are about motherhood. Well, in some ways they are. The characters themselves are not mothers in any of these books, or at least that’s not central to the book. Motherhood is a theme, but they are not the mothers. So that’s interesting.
The five that were profoundly important to me as I was writing this and trying to craft and voice and scene were American Marriage by Tayari Jones, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver, and The Leaver by Lisa Ko. Those were the ones I kept by my bed and that I kept when I was moving back and forth between Boston and New Orleans when I started the book. So I was doing my MFA and I had two copies of them, one in both cities. I would go back to those books constantly to just understand the energy behind dialogue and how you get characters in the room who are saying something meaningful to each other.