Under Water, the debut novel from Tara Menon, is a compelling exploration of friendship, grief, and the fluidity of both. With two natural disasters – the 2004 tsunami in Thailand that claimed a quarter of a million lives, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as it made landfall in New York City – framing the story.
Throughout the novel, Menon weaves themes of uniqueness and extinction, distillation and expansion, into the language of sea life, flora, and fauna, as well as the beautiful bond between these two young girls. The story also deftly explores the relationship between the consumer and the consumed, and how we live as both, with varying degrees of awareness and complicity.
I spoke with Menon about her writing background, writing her debut, and how the structure came to be.
Rita Hickey: What is something about you related to this story or how it came about that is not a part of your bio?
Tara Menon: My bio notes that I grew up in Singapore but it does not mention how often I travelled to beaches in neighboring countries (especially Thailand) with family and friends. In December 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami made landfall across countries in South and Southeast Asia, I was home safe in Singapore and not, as I often was, on a beach elsewhere. The 2004 tsunami claimed 250,000 lives. I found it impossible to comprehend loss at that scale, but I also couldn’t stop imagining what it would have been like to be on one of the calm, beautiful beaches I knew so well and watch it transform into a nightmare. Masochistically, I watched video after video of the disaster. I was also in New York when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. After that storm, I was struck first by the difference between disasters that come with a warning and those that don’t, and then by the differences in responses, material and emotional, depending on where disaster strikes.
RH: For Marissa, Frankenstein is about the friendship between two women. How and when did you choose the tsunami and Sandy for this story, to explore the growth and grief of a friendship?
TM: That moment in the novel—when Marissa reads Frankenstein and, unlike her classmates, thinks Shelley’s novel is about friendship reveals that even her critical imagination has been shaped by her experience of losing her friend. She misses her friend so much that she sees friendship everywhere. I wanted to write a story about grief, and the particular character of grief for a friend, but I also wanted to write about the natural world that we are losing too quickly—another kind of loss that we might, even should, grieve. The tsunami and Hurricane Sandy were two large scale environmental catastrophes which brought devastation both to humans and to the environment. The tsunami claimed many human lives but also decimated habitats for plants and animals and it felt like the right event to explore grief of various kinds.
RH: The story is contained in Marissa’s grief surrounding Arielle, but also for her mother, the environment and the now tarnished memories of the island where her heart, and her father’s heart, healed. What came first? The characters and their friendship or did your extensive research allow you to find manta rays and the many other references that nestle so fittingly into this story?
TM: Arielle and Marissa came first. When I was in college, I read Tennyson glorious poem In Memoriam about his enduring grief for his friend Arthur Hallam. I was so struck by his beautiful lamentation for his friend. In some ways, Under Water is a rewriting of that poem, with some obvious and significant changes. But I also knew I wanted to locate the story of these two girls in the natural world and especially in the world underwater. I did a lot of research about the animals who inhabit our rapidly disappearing coral reefs. After I came across a research paper that showed that female manta rays have enduring social bonds with each other, I knew that mantas had to be the central non human species in this novel about female friendship.
RH: Given your knowledge of classic literature and history, did you know you wanted to include specific history before writing or did you distill while researching and find those that corresponded/correlated to the story of the friendship between these two girls?
TM: I didn’t predetermine which references or allusions appear in the novel. Instead, I let the story between Arielle and Marissa remind me of specific poems or memoirs or novels or works of philosophy. Many of the texts I allude to are from the Western canon of literature and philosophy—texts I read as an undergraduate at Columbia when I took required courses in the college’s Core Curriculum. But I also tried to include my own mini canons of various kinds: texts about grief, about female friendship, about floods and water. Sometimes these come all at once (for example, Marissa’s account of tearing through various kinds of literature about grief) but in other cases, such as the books about floods and water, they are woven throughout the novel. Often, these are more subtle—the reader has to really know the texts to get the reference.
RH: Arielle, as specter, stays with Marissa, the way that grief and trauma can shadow our everyday. How did that choice come about in the writing process?
TM: Eight years after Arielle’s death, Marissa remains consumed by grief for her friend. Arielle occupies Marissa’s every waking thought and visits her in her dreams. Her ghostly appearance in the New York sections of the novel (long after her death) shows just how large a presence she has in Marissa’s mind.
RH: Time jumps affect pacing and allow the reader to stay inside the friendship. There is no rush to get to the moment of devastation for Marissa, so the build is quite satisfying. Did jumping between time and place help the story unfold for you? Why that structure?
TM: I decided on the structure of this novel (the alternating chapters between New York in 2012 and Thailand in 2004) very early on in the writing process. Both timelines move chronologically towards the two large-scale natural disasters: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed a quarter of a million people in countries across South East Asia and South Asia, and Hurricane Sandy, which killed 233 people across countries in the Caribbean and states on the Eastern seaboard of the United States and caused $70 billion of damage. Although they share a structure and are both narrated by Marissa in the present tense, the two sections are split not only by time and geography but also by tone. In 2004, Marissa’s voice is bright and lively while in 2012, he grief for Arielle, and shock from the tsunami and its aftermath, color her vision. The different sections highlight the differences between these two times and places, but at the same time, perhaps less obviously, I wanted to move back and forth to also call attention to some of the similarities.
RH: Like the chili that “warns us of a danger that doesn’t exist and launches our body into unnecessary overdrive,” Marissa has been in that overdrive for eight years. She returns to her father, the island and to the hawksbill accompanying the kayak. Did you always know she would go back?
TM: I wrote most of this novel out of order. I sometimes spent weeks, even months, writing the idyllic sections set in the pristine coastal environments of Thailand; the very first scenes I completed were the nightmares which occur across the book; I wrote the restaurant scene very early on. But, I wrote the last chapter right at the end—genuinely, two days before I sent the finished manuscript to my agent. This is all to say, I wasn’t always sure how the book would end, but when I had everything except the ending it felt clear to me that Marissa had to go back home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tara Menon was born in India, grew up in Singapore, spent a decade in New York, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she is an assistant professor of English at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Nation and the Paris Review.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Rita Hickey’s writing has appeared in Rum Punch Press and most recently she opened the Women in Noir reading for the 2025 Beacon LitFest. In past lives she wrote, produced and performed in an educational theater company out of Brooklyn and ran creative writing workshops on Rikers Island for women and men. She lives in Manhattan and is at work on her first novel.