Kirtan Nautiyal’s We Are Not These Bodies is a memoir in essays about fathers, sons, faith, and Indian American belonging. Structured around the Hindu ritual of aarti, Nautiyal traces his effort to reclaim his cultural inheritance while exploring family history, infertility, his work as an oncologist, and the loss of his father.
Nautiyal is an Indian American writer and practicing hematologist and oncologist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Guernica, Electric Literature, and Longreads, among others. We Are Not These Bodies will be published by the University of North Carolina Press on February 23, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of We Are Not These Bodies, designed by Lindsay Starr. Below, Nautiyal discusses avoiding stereotypical imagery, the significance of a lamp offered to flowing water, and how the final design reflects the book’s themes of tradition, return, and transience.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I didn’t begin the writing of this book thinking that what I was doing was even the start of a book. I didn’t have an MFA or any connections in the literary world or any of the other things I told myself I needed to have to be a “real writer.” I was just moving words around, trying to tell a story of myself that made sense. I published a few of those early essays in literary journals, because that seemed like what folks did once the work of writing was done.
It wasn’t until Cate Hodorowicz, who’d later become my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, read one of those pieces and reached out to ask me if I what I was doing might be the beginnings of a book that I began to think how the writing I was doing could serve as the foundations of something longer. As I spent the next few years working on the manuscript with her, the shape and structure of the book began to emerge for me. As part of that, I started to think about how we might design a cover that captured the book’s braided concerns: fathers and sons, leavings and returnings, and how the continual reclamation of tradition can be the truest expression of tradition. Though I didn’t yet have a clear picture of what the cover would be, I knew I wanted something that captured these themes without being too on the nose or relying on tired stereotypes of Indian American life.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Lindsay and I corresponded over email about my ideas for the cover, most of which were mediocre at best. As a part of that process, I completed a short survey indicating what cover styles I most liked and what images I wanted to stay away from. No Ganesha statues, I said. She took it from there, using her own understanding of the book’s themes to settle on a central image of a lamp offered to a flowing river and employing typography to highlight the title in a way that harmonized with that image.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It’s been moving to see my book continue the process of slowly materializing after spending so many years as a Word file emailed to and from my editors at UNC Press. It was strangely shocking how much more real the book felt after making its first transformation into final page proofs, even when only in the form of a PDF file. Seeing the cover felt like the next logical step in that process, and I can’t wait to get the final physical copies very soon.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Growing up in small-town Oklahoma, I resented how my Indian heritage set me apart. It was only years later, as an over-educated twenty-something searching for a sense of home in this world, that I began to question all I’d assumed about what my immigrant parents had taught me. Structured around the circular Hindu ritual of the aarti, my book We Are Not These Bodies is a memoir in essays that chronicles my attempt to return to this cultural inheritance on my own terms.
With its depiction of a lamp offered to flowing waters, the cover alludes to the central ritual of the book in a way that I think helps capture its searching tone without resorting to stereotypical imagery. There is also a sense of transience inherent in flowing water that I think echoes my book’s concern with the transience of bodies in time. “We are not these bodies,” my father taught us. I’m still trying to figure out if that’s true.