USA TODAY 8/19/2003 9:42 PM
Interview with Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri...
...being a foreigner is "a sort of lifelong pregnancy," Lahiri writes, "a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."
... she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems tentative and spare."
Much of her fiction, Lahiri says, comes from listening to others, then putting herself "in their shoes to try to imagine that feeling for myself."
She imagined herself being pregnant in Japan ... and "what that would feel like."
