Raghav Rao was born in Mumbai, India. He grew up in London, Los Angeles, and Southern India, graduating from the University of Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and The Office of Modern Composition and, outside of work and writing, he enjoys bird-watching, playing squash, and biking. He told us about memories of living in Southern India as a child and the impact revisiting some of these had on him and his book, Missy.
How did your own experiences growing up in Southern India influence the creation of Missy Royce's character and the setting of your novel?
Every character in Missy and Missy herself are inspired by real people! Not necessarily a single person, but she and the other characters are amalgams of notable personalities from my childhood, people who live in the mind, whose physical appearance or a certain weird quirk made them unforgettable!
Southern India, its ancient hills, its fertile deltas, it's all baked in me in layers. I grew up there. I went to boarding school there amidst plentiful nature. Over many train journeys and bus journeys, the landscape imprinted in me, kilometre after kilometre. It was the overall vibe, to borrow a zeitgeist word, that I drew on.
Beyond that, I drew on countless specifics. With my Dad especially, because he loves temples, I travelled quite a bit in Southern India and so I visited a bronze forge and knew I wanted to fold it into my novel.
What inspired you to explore themes of identity, belonging, and the complexities of immigrant success in your debut novel, "Missy"?
I'm in a cross-cultural marriage. I'm Indian or rather, I was Indian since I had to renounce my Indian citizenship when I became an American citizen. But of course, I will always be Indian on some level. My wife meanwhile is herself the product of a cross-cultural relationship. Her mother is Japanese and her father is American. And then my parents are also in a cross-cultural marriage; my father is Kannadiga and my mother is Gujarati.
And so, I think when Indians or South Asians travel abroad, in some sense, they become a new category and how they were understood by each other is now changed in that new location. Every time there is upheaval like that there's opportunity for writers. And how people make marriages and relationships work, how they adjust expectations, and confront assumptions -- these are important daily life questions that anyone can relate to.
As a male author writing a female lead character, how did the women in your life influence your portrayal of Missy, and what challenges did you face in bringing her story to life?
MFAs are often criticized for good reason but for me at least, I was grateful because in early drafts I had several women professors who explicitly told me that I was succeeding in Missy's POV. They told me, 'Don't second-guess your way out of this.' That kept me going. It's easy in a highly critical culture to say I don't have the authority to take on this voice. I'm grateful to my mentors for giving me that permission.
Obviously, women like my wife, my grandmother, and my mother are all deep influences on me. But Missy is alive today in the hands of readers because of another set of women, the women in the publishing world who toil indefatigably in an industry with shrinking margins. So people like my agent, Priya Doraswamy (Lotus Lane Lit) and my UK editor Keshini Naidoo (Hera Books); are real-life Missys in a sense because they are business owners or senior business leaders but they are also values-driven. They lift up entire communities and inclusively make a bigger tent for writers and the reading public. Similarly, most of my writing mentors have been women. Frankly, with the exception of a couple of notable men, the reason I have a book deal, the reason I'm doing any of this, is because of many badass, smart-as-hell, hardworking women.
What message or understanding do you hope readers will take away from "Missy," especially regarding the immigrant experience and the notion of identity?
This is a great question and I'm hoping, in time, readers can educate me. What did they take from this? How did it remind them of their own lives or their own misunderstandings about their parents' former lives?
But to answer now, I hope readers see that so much of life is contingent on things outside of our control. So often when we have control, we try and squeeze life and keep it in its bottle but it always finds a way of squirming out. Living with more flexibility to randomness can help when plans, inevitably, go awry.
Looking ahead, what themes or stories are you excited to explore in your future writing projects, and how do you see your work evolving?
I want to continue writing about cross-cultural relationships without necessarily pigeon-holing myself as an 'ethnic writer'; thanks to my wife's heritage, I've been fortunate to spend a good bit of time in Japan and am currently learning Japanese.
I'm also interested in how to achieve stillness in an information-saturated culture and have a newsletter (raghavrao.substack.com) on the subject and I think Japan is a good entryway for this exploration.
Japan is a great setting for a book about cross-cultural misunderstanding because of its history. I suspect that there might be a reading market, too, for a book that can show Americans, Japanese people, and Indians all somehow mashed together in Japan if it's done right. But again, doing it right is easier said than done!
