Monica ali
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Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiancee, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin's parents get to know Joe's firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals.
As Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she holds most dear, she's also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a 'love marriage' actually means. Love Marriage is a story about who we are and how we love in today's Britain - with all the complications and contradictions of life, desire, marriage and family. What starts as a captivating social comedy develops into a heart-breaking and gripping story of two cultures, two families and two people trying to understand one another.
1. What does a day in the life of Monica Ali look like?
At the moment, because I’m still in the middle of promoting this book, there’s not much routine. But when I’m writing, the day tends to be – do a few sun salutations, meditate, walk the dog, go to my desk. If it’s a bad day, if the words aren’t coming, then I’ll do more walking. That usually helps. If it’s a good day then the dog is very dutiful about reminding me to get up and move.
2. How do you set yourself up for a day of writing?
See above! Also, I try to end each writing day before I run out of juice. It can be a long day or a short day. The point is to finish at a point where I think I know what I want to write next, so that I don’t come to the desk ‘cold’. But I don’t always manage that. It’s very tempting to keep going when you’re on a roll.
3. You set about writing the Ghorami and Sangster families separately, but Love Marriage was born because you merged the two. What was it that made you realise the two were better as one?
I just knew it was going to be a lot of fun to write. The Ghoramis happen to be from India, but they really could be any family that’s quite conservative. An Irish Catholic family, for example. Putting them together with Harriet Sangster, who is radically open about her sex life (and famed for her memoir about it), offers a great deal in the way of anxieties, which is inherently dramatic. And if that family also happens to be of a different social class (the Ghoramis are middle class, but Harriet is properly ‘posh’ and wealthy), so much the better. And there are always tensions around the coming together of the bride’s family with the groom’s family, and the planning of a wedding. They’re just heightened when the backgrounds are dissimilar.
4. Alternatively, were there any similarities that demonstrate what’s wrong with preconceived ideas and perceptions on feminism, faith, race or gender?
Absolutely! At the outset, Yasmin feels that it’s her family that’s not ‘normal’. She envies the openness of the Sangsters, and Joe’s apparent freedom. But Joe has his demons and is anything but free, because he doesn’t understand his compulsions. Yasmin quite rightly resents it when people make assumptions about her based on her ethnicity or gender. Yet she frequently makes assumptions about others – as we all do. For instance, she’s deeply suspicious about Harriet’s motivations for befriending Anisah. But Harriet, at bottom, has a good heart, and Yasmin is wrong about her.
5. What’s changed generationally in attitudes towards love and marriage since writing Brick Lane in 2003? What were the most significant differences you noticed between Nazneen’s freedoms in Brick Lane and Yasmin’s in Love Marriage?
I think it’s less to do with what’s changed and more to do with the fact that Yasmin’s story is entirely different to Nazneen’s. A version of Brick Lane could still be written today. And I still get sent copies of books that do something similar to that. But the only thing Yasmin has in common with Nazneen is that they both have brown skin. Nazneen is a teenage virgin bride, uneducated, who grew up in rural Bangladesh, has an arranged marriage to a much older man, is deeply religious, and lives in a poor working-class neighbourhood. Yasmin is 26, highly educated, born and bred in London, her parents are from India, she is a middle-class professional, engaged to a fellow doctor with whom she fell in love, and lives in a nice London suburb. Their worlds are worlds apart. I know that a few people here have dubbed Love Marriage as Brick Lane for 2022. That is utter rubbish, and I think it reflects the fact that brown families just get lumped together whereas white families are automatically granted their uniqueness. Can you imagine a similar comparison being made if the two people described above were white?
6. Love Marriage shows how bringing cultures together can be fuelled by tensions, but with acceptance and understanding can be interesting (as seen initially in the relationship with the traditional Indian mother and eccentric English mother-in-law). Is this a message for the world to be kinder, less divisive perhaps?
I’m glad you’ve got that this is not a ‘culture clash’ book. I’ve seen it described as that! There are two cultures, which makes for some anxiety and embarrassment on Yasmin’s part. But as you say, they come together and try to understand each other. Far from clashing, Harriet embraces the Ghoramis rather too whole-heartedly for Yasmin’s liking! What I’m hoping for readers is that they enjoy the book as a good old-fashioned propulsive read. And if, along the way, it raises some questions about the assumptions we make about each other, then that’s also great.
7. I’ve heard quite a few authors talk about both the pain and joy of writing sex. What was your experience of it, as there’s a lot of (very good) sex in the novel?
Ha! Thank you. It was terrifying in prospect, but actually when I came to write the sex scenes it was fine because it’s so integral to Yasmin’s growth as a character. Sex is the engine of this book in narrative terms – most of the major turning points hinge on it in one way or another: infidelity, revenge sex, sex addiction, sexual violence, issues of sexual identity. And it’s often at the heart of how the protagonists grapple with their identities, or mature into them. Most frequently it’s also pivotal in the conflict and drama within the families as well. So although there’s only two actual sex scenes in the book they felt very necessary to me, not window dressing, and so that gave me the courage to get stuck in, as it were!
8. Why did you choose to make female desire, sexuality and infidelity prominent themes from the perspective of a woman with Bengali immigrant parents?
I’d say that male desire and sexuality is very present as well – in Yasmin’s father and brother, and of course in Joe. Sex is, in a Freudian sense, every character’s weakness, and every character’s strength. It’s both a driving force, a source of pleasure, joy, freedom, celebration, and the locus of secrets, guilt, lies, shame, and misunderstandings.
9. You’ve tackled issues from Islamophobia, NHS underfunding and Brexit, to sexual desires, infidelity, and family secrets, all the while keeping things humorous and relatively light. Why did you choose to do that?
Some dark and difficult things happen in this novel, as in life, but I think humour is essential. Without it, our capacity for self-delusion is almost limitless. Comedy is a prescription against falling into pessimism. And with humour we can embrace all our human folly and striving with warmth and compassion.
10. Now that’s it out for the world to read, how are you feeling? What’s next for Monica Ali?
I’m feeling grateful that it’s finding its way to readers! And that readers are enjoying it. I’m currently adapting it for television with New Pictures, so I’m busy with that, and loving the challenge of screenwriting and very happy that I’m still living with Yasmin and Joe.