Roshan Sethi’s debut, The Simp: A Novel Without a Hero, is a Hollywood satire written in conversation with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. It follows an aspiring actor into an assistant job from hell with a biting sense of humor, a keen point of view on identity politics, and a bit of hope for any artist creating into the void. If anyone could combine such seemingly disparate elements with confidence and control, it’s Sethi. He’s not just a novelist, he’s a director, screenwriter, and practicing oncologist.
The very busy Sethi made time after working on call at his hospital to speak over the phone about the perils of undergrad creative writing workshops, the trouble with The White Lotus season one, and why he almost exclusively reads the classics.
Amanda Nyren: In your acknowledgments, you share a story about writing your first book as a child. It seems like you caught the writing bug early. How did you wind up working in medicine and then back in a creative field?
Roshan Sethi: I’d always wanted to be a fiction writer, but when I was in college at Yale, I had started to write a lot of short fiction and submit it to all these literary journals like the Yale Literary Magazine and it was rejected from everything.
I had such a chip on my shoulder about that. I felt like all those people who went to the Yale Lit magazine events, they just seemed like such fancy white people, who had gone to like Deerfield Academy and read all the right authors and could write literary fiction that I didn’t honestly understand. It felt a little too deliberately obscure, and coldly restrained. I’d grown up on Bollywood, which is so lush and melodramatic, full of life. It seemed that the job was to not show your hand in a weird way, to seem cool and disaffected.
At the same time, I had taken a fiction workshop and also been discouraged by what the professor, who is a very well-known writer, said to me about my writing. I wrote a short story and the next day, they had written part on the chalkboard and said, this is an example of a really bad first sentence for a short story. I was so humiliated.
It crushed me so much that I gave up on writing a novel and went to med school and fell into screenwriting kind of by chance. I felt like maybe that’s what I was meant to do, like maybe I wasn’t good enough at prose, maybe I was better at dialogue and had found the right place for my talents.
AN: I’m so glad that you found your way back to prose because I loved this book from page one. It’s so bitingly funny and also has a lot of heart and depth to it. It’s obviously inspired by Vanity Fair and you’ve talked about your process where you were reading Vanity Fair and started writing The Simp alongside it, a little bit of each every day. What was the idea or image you started with? Did you know right away it would be a satire of Hollywood?
RS: I was not at all planning to write a novel. I’m a huge reader of novels. I read more than I watch. But like I said I’d given up on that and then ten years went by, and I was growing increasingly frustrated in Hollywood because it felt so racist to me and so backwards, and then I read Vanity Fair, and out of nowhere, it birthed this desire to write a book that was a little bit like Vanity Fair with an anti-hero and set in a world of manners and hypocrisy, a kind of world I knew very well in Los Angeles.
Like you said, I read 30 pages of Vanity Fair, and I wrote, I think, 2000 or 3000 words of The Simp, every day in concert. I would write in the morning, then I would read in the afternoon. I ended up finishing the first draft of The Simp in like three-and-a-half or four weeks—very quickly. In the same amount of time, I finished reading the book, so it was almost like I was rewriting it, though obviously I wasn’t because the plots have nothing to do with each other. But they could not have been more in lockstep.
AN: Did you intend The Simp as an homage, or are the two more in conversation with each other? Tell me about the decision to reference Vanity Fair directly rather than as an allusion.
RS: It was completely unconscious, as is every decision in the book. I am not someone who writes with a lot of intention. I don’t outline, for example, and I don’t really plan anything. In Hollywood, there are people who write with outlines almost exclusively. It’s almost mathematical and scientific and you’d think I would like that since I’m so scientific myself, but I actually don’t when I’m writing.
AN: What is your process?
RS: I try to write as if I’m not present. I write in l this trance-like state in the morning where I have no judgment at all whatsoever towards what I’m writing. I find I can’t write very well if the critical or self-consorious part of my brain, which is quite large, is active. Later in the day, I’ll revise for about an hour in a highly critical state of mind.
I personally feel that I do a better job of writing, or I write more interesting and more real things when my conscious brain isn’t engaged at all. You know how when you have a really good story, and you’re excited to tell someone, because you just know how to tell it, and you know it’ll land? That is the feeling I try to write in. And none of that requires premeditation or architecture.
AN: I love how that mode assumes or imagines an audience. The book deals a lot with this concept of the abyss, or creating art despite having no audience. This is something I and I think a lot of others know well.
RS: You have to be delusional to keep going.
AN: You do. But what fuels that delusion for you? And how do you keep going despite the abyss? You have an audience now but what would you do if you came up on a lot of rejection again?
RS: For me the delusion has just really been a desire to prove myself. I just kept writing, because I wasn’t willing to handle that rejection.
At this age, I honestly don’t know how I’d keep going, because my delusion was so high in my twenties. It was enough to sustain me through those rejections and in the face of indifference, which is what it felt like for many years.
I do wish someone had explained to me that in any creative industry, there’s so much randomness. It’s not a fair game, and there isn’t a proportional return to your efforts, no matter what talent you bring to the table. That would have given me a feeling of peace, because I was expecting a fair system, especially having come from medicine, where if you score higher on the MCAT, then you are more likely to get into a medical school. I mean, the MCAT is a highly flawed tool, but it is a measure at least, and, a standardized one. Whereas in the creative industry, you’re completely subject to people’s tastes, which are highly variable and sometimes just wrong.
AN: How did you wind up writing for television?
RS: Well, it wasn’t intentional. I basically became a medical consultant because I was kind of bored in medical school and looking for something creative. They hired me on this pilot, although it didn’t go to series. But then I became a medical consultant on another show by the same writer, and on that show, I started sending script pages of scenes that I thought should be in the show, and they used them in places. The creator got me an agent, and then we co-created a show together. I had no prior interest in medical shows, I was just trying to get into some creative life of some kind, which medical consulting was not creative in the beginning.
AN: I imagine it was very dry, like, “Oh he would use this sort of scalpel.”
RS: It was like, “Is it this syringe or is it this syringe?” And, you know, truthfully I was in medical school, and I didn’t really know. So I was sometimes making it up, but I was just trying to stay with one foot in the door of an industry that is so hard to get into. Again, not because it’s fairly evaluating talent and turning away people who are less talented, but because it requires this strange web of connections.
AN. As your creative career has taken off, have you felt any validation or vindication?
RS: I’ve never felt that. Every day I feel disappointed in myself in some way, which is so crazy. It sounds like I’m not being sincere when I say that, but I truly have that feeling every day. It doesn’t matter what I achieve. I do try to question it, though.
I think part of it is that for many of the years that I’m describing, all the way until I was 30, I was closeted, and there was a hole in me that I was trying to fill. That may be why I’m still struggling to receive approval.
One kind of toxic crazy thing I do is read every Letterboxd review of every movie that I’ve ever directed. I’ve read them all. For example, “A Nice Indian Boy” has 60,000 reviews. I read them all. I skim past the good ones and just read the bad ones because I’m looking to feel disappointed in myself. That is somehow related to my drive.
AN: It’s like the main character in The Simp, Raj: He lives this double life where on the outside, he’s the simpering, held together assistant, but then he has to act out in various ways when no one’s looking. It’s very hard to have that kind of double life. There’s a need to integrate all our selves and, without spoiling anything, that’s how the end felt to me. Throughout the book, you complicate identity and class politics. All the main characters are shown to have a bit of Thackeray’s conniving Becky and trampled-upon Amelia in them. You also highlight some of the performative ways DEI has been employed in recent years. To me, especially when I got to the end, it felt like the book and Raj were revealing that people don’t fit in boxes (or maybe roles) and the best we can do is be honestly ourselves, tell our true stories. Even if it seems like no one cares or will listen. What are your thoughts on all this?
RS: I think it’s exactly as you expressed it. It’s interesting because so much of the story around minorities and white people in Hollywood is a story that has been externally forced on us. There was such a desire in the diversity years for minorities to be good and for white people to be bad, not just in Hollywood, but culturally, generally speaking. What that led to was an extremism that neither side was actually deep down interested in.
The idea that there’s a Becky and Amelia is the idea that you’re neither the hero nor the victim nor the transgressor nor the one who has transgressed upon. That it can be much, much more complicated than the optics in the culture in those years wanted it to be. That did us all a disservice in the end.
I was particularly struck by this in the first season of “The White Lotus,” where there’s such a tenderness and caution shown towards the minority characters in a show that’s entirely written and directed by a white man. Like he’s so afraid for those people to be in the wrong, they stopped being real. Then you have people like Connie Britton who’s so delicious in that first season and feels so real. The minority characters, in contrast, are plot devices because nobody wanted to invest them with anything negative.
So the idea at the end of The Simp is that he’s neither good nor bad. He is just his full, unsympathetic or sympathetic self.
AN: Besides Thackeray, you also refer to Shakespeare throughout. Are you a reader of the classics? A champion?
RS: I love the classics. I read almost nothing contemporary because I find it’s not as good. I think part of that is I like a robust, strong narrative. So I read almost exclusively nineteenth-century fiction where the beauty of prose was combined with excellent storytelling to a degree that we’ve lost in more recent years. I think Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Diaz are exceptions, but I otherwise see almost a disdain for story in a lot of contemporary fiction. We’re just drowning in vibes. I need a story. So I go back to the nineteenth century for that reason, and I go back to Shakespeare, who’s obviously much earlier than the nineteenth century, for that reason.
The other reason I’m attracted to that literature is that I really relate to Victorian society, which is obviously after Austin, so I mean more Henry James. Because they were so repressed and everything is so subterranean that it reminds me of growing up closeted in a traditional Indian family. Nothing can be said, romance is so mysterious and strange in those years, and everything is communicated by sharp glances. It’s so the opposite of now, but l just feel at home in that world. I think traditional Indian society is a lot like British society for obvious reasons, but it’s especially like Victorian British society.
AN: I get what you’re saying, and it is part of the modernist and postmodernist point of view to insist that the Dickensian plot is not what life feels like. This brings to mind Jim H., Raj’s boss, the gritty film director. At one point, Jim expresses that he wants his art to be real, and Raj thinks why? Why recreate our pain and fear and be reminded of it? What do you want the art you create to be? The Simp is incredibly funny. Do you consider comedy the highest art?
RS: I just want it to not be boring. That’s my only goal ever is just to avoid boredom. I’m so terrified of boring anybody. Even as I’m talking to you, that’s all I’m thinking, because I have this robotic monotone that I cultivated as part of my dissociation during medicine, and that is not helping matters.
I think people are anesthetized by life now because they’re scrolling all the time, and they’re not processing anything that they’re experiencing while scrolling. They’re being stabbed with anxiety and all these actual emotions, but they’re moving on towards the next small dopamine hit. And as a result, they’re craving a real solid feeling.
I struggle to understand biologically why, but we seem to need to read and watch things that make us feel things in a real way. Why is that the case? I don’t know. We have mirror neurons that are for empathy. So when we see someone cry, we almost automatically start crying because our brain is programmed so that we just repeat the gestures of other people. That is related to our ability to understand people, which must be important for social cohesion or “the tribe.”
But this need for storytelling, I don’t understand. It’s kind of wild. Regardless, I’m always looking to offer a feeling of any kind. I think laughter is a feeling. I think crying is a feeling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Roshan Sethi is a writer, director, and practicing oncologist. He is the cocreator of The Resident, which ran for six seasons on Fox. His directorial debut, 7 Days, won the Independent Spirit Award for best first feature. He subsequently directed World’s Best for Disney+ and cowrote the abortion drama Call Jane, which premiered at Sundance in 2022. His third film as a director, A Nice Indian Boy, recently premiered at SXSW to rave reviews. His next film, The Surgeon, starring Michelle Yeoh and Martin Freeman, is forthcoming. The Simp is his debut novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Amanda Nyren‘s writing has been published in Sonora Review, The Pinch, and Phoebe. She studied Creative Writing at Northwestern University and lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her on Substack.