Mamta Chaudhry
Mamta Chaudhry’s debut novel, HAUNTING PARIS (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), has been praised as “elegantly wrought” by The New York Times Book Review and “a heart-wrenching love letter to Paris” by Publishers Weekly. Marilynne Robinson called “this fine first novel . . . a small parable, pondering the nature of civilization itself,” and Russell Banks described it as “powerful and moving . . . with a heartbreaking, profoundly adult love story at its center.”
Mamta Chaudhry lives with her husband in Coral Gables, Florida, and they spend part of each year in India and in France. Much of her professional career was in television and classical radio at stations in Calcutta, Gainesville, Dallas, and Miami. Her early fiction, poetry, and feature articles have been published in newspapers and magazines in the States and in India, including the Miami Review, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Telegraph, The Statesman, Writer’s Digest, and The Rotarian. She is currently working on a second novel.
Twitter: @mamtachaudhry1
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
I’ve worked at classical music radio stations in various cities, and as both program director and announcer, it was my JOB to listen to music all day long. In my job as a writer, I need complete silence, all the better to hear the voices of my characters. Yet classical music is so deeply in my bloodstream that it shapes what and how I write, and often dictates the pacing of a scene, whether it should be allegro or andante or presto.
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
I was flabbergasted when someone asked if I had a five-year financial plan that I'd discussed with my accountant before embarking on my novel. If five-year plans and accountants were in my vocabulary, I’m not sure I would have chosen fiction, which seems like a straight path to insolvency. But in other ways, it’s a rich and rewarding life.
Favorite non-reading activity?
I love to garden—it’s the best way of taking my nose out of a book and breathing some fresh air. But I realize that even when I’m digging deeper and deeper into the earth, or optimistically planting a variety of seeds, or ruthlessly pruning some overgrown plants, it allows me to mirror with my hands the activities I do in my mind when I’m absorbed in writing.
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
Both, and that’s why every spring and fall I head to France. In Paris—my favorite city in the world—I revel in art, music, opera, restaurants, and watching people from everywhere in the world stroll beside the Seine. And when I’ve had my fill, I retreat to a landscape of hills and vineyards and the rippling sound of a much smaller river close by the house where we stay. When the rusticity of la France profonde begins to pall, Paris is just three hours away.
What do you worry about?
You name it and I’ll work it into my worries. They contain multitudes: from the smallest thing (how do I finish this scene?) to the largest (how will the planet survive?). And if you know of any writers who answer “Nothing” to this question, I’d really like to meet them!
