Interview: Kamila Shamsie, author, Best of Friends — “I’m not interested in writing a stereotype”

A lot of research went into your last few books. Was that the case for Best of Friends too?

It had less research than the previous three novels. The section set in 1988 in Karachi was based on my experience, but there were gaps in my memory. So I would go on Twitter and ask, “Karachi people, give me the names of video shops in the 1980s.”

While the first section required little research as I had lived through it and it was about two girls in school, for the latter, I had to figure out what venture capitalists do. I knew about civil liberties groups and migrant rights, but I had to look into the legal aspects, the things people might get caught for, processes, etc. It was interesting because venture capitalism and civil liberties are such different worlds.

I like how the characters are richly detailed and encompass contradictions. I hadn’t imagined I would read about a queer brown immigrant donating to the Tories. Could you talk about how you fleshed them out?

Interestingly, with this book, both protagonists just came to my mind. Usually, that happens with one character — if you’re lucky. In this case, I had a sense of not only who they were as girls, but also who they would become later in life, along with their complexities and contradictions. Rather than figuring them out, it was as if I was looking at them and thinking: how do I put you on the page so readers get to know you.

I’m not interested in writing a stereotype. Though I guess some people conform to stereotypes, once you get to know most up close, there’s something interesting going on. Particularly if you enter a society as a migrant, to be at the centre of power, you will have to make compromises or enact blindnesses. One character exemplifies this, but even the activist is more of an establishment figure than she would like to admit.

In an interview with The Scottish Review of Books, you said, “One of the things that has always been true is that with every novel I have wanted to do something I haven’t done before. I always want to push myself further.” What did you do differently with Best of Friends?

I’m glad you asked that because with Best of Friends, I returned to the territory of my initial novels. They were all set in Karachi, in a certain milieu — people who lived within two square miles [of each other]. With this novel, I wanted to revisit that world and write it differently — with more critical awareness about how power and gender work in that world.

I’ve done jumps in novels before, but here I wanted to develop the characters and their relationship well and then jump to 30 years later. You believe they’re the same people, it’s the same friendship, but also, they’re 45 now rather than 14.

Did you have this jump in mind when you first conceived the characters or did the novel’s structure evolve?

Very much the latter. When I started writing, I knew the novel would end in the present. But I had thought it would have several sections — each might jump about five years, so it would be incremental. I tried to write it that way, but discovered I wasn’t interested in the protagonists in their twenties and thirties. I was interested in where they started as adolescents and where they are today.

What were the challenges in writing the novel?

I had to take the plunge and get rid of what I had written about the intervening years. It was useful to do that first draft because I got to live with the characters through those years. But readers didn’t need that. It wasn’t working as a piece of writing.

There was also the question of having both protagonists equally present. I not only had to balance between them, but also give them stories I could follow. I needed a reason to go from one to the other and back. In the first section, their lives run parallelly, but in the latter, they have different trajectories. So, I had to work on a sense of wholeness and unity while moving from one to the other.

Over the past decade, female friendships have figured prominently in popular culture and fiction, such as in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. Why do you think this is the case?

There still aren’t enough books about friendship compared to, say, romantic relationships or about parents and children. And I’m not just talking about female friendships — when I was growing up, my closest friend was a boy.

During adolescence, friendships are important, but in the 20s and 30s, people focus on their careers or starting a family. When they reach their 40s or so, they realise they need relationships outside the professional and familial structure — people you can rely on, but also separate from. Childhood friends often become a lifeline. They’re people who’ve always known you. You could spend months or years apart, but there’s still something solid about those.

I love the Elena Ferrante novels, but what also happens with stories of female friendships is they often end up being about sexual jealousy. I play with that idea in the novel’s first half, but move away from it because that’s not been my experience of friendship. I wanted to write against — I’m not saying write against Ferrante, who is brilliant — but write against the trope that dramatic tension in female friendships has to arise from sexual jealousy. I wanted to move away from heteronormative stories and the idea that friends have the same preferences or interests, culminating in the most basic kind of love triangle.

In a 2019 interview, you said that you don’t see much hope for the world amid rising populism and climate change. How has that influenced your fiction?

We say these things in moments and then we have other kinds of moments. I would say I’m an optimist about people, but a pessimist about the people who often get to power, especially in populist times. I don’t think I could write the books I write if I were pessimistic about human beings and their potential. I do think we’re in a terrible moment, but I feel hopeful when I go to universities and talk to the younger generation. We just need to not destroy everything until they’re old enough to make decisions (laughs).

In terms of political shifts, it’s like a pendulum. Besides, there are always people who fight back. Watching Sri Lanka right now, how people are taking to the streets… even something small, like Rajapaksa trying to escape, but the airport staff not letting him. You want to cheer at such times. There will always be resistance to the worst kind of politics.

But climate change has a point of no-return, so it’s harder to know where to feel optimistic. We have to accept that we live in a world of consequences — not everything can be made okay.

A character in the novel says, “When you live in an unjust world, you want sports to be a refuge, not a reminder.” What is your refuge from the world?

My friends, books, TV, among other things. It’s interesting with refuge… sometimes you want to be in a space where you’re not thinking about horrible things. But I also know and admire people who are fighters, on the battleground, not despondent, not giving in. There’s a kind of refuge in their company.

One thing that stood out in the novel is that if you belong to the elite, your life in Karachi is similar to your life in London. People might call Pakistan a failing state and the UK a beacon of democracy, but you show how things are not so different in the corridors of power. How do you see this shaping up in political discourse or fiction?

We still don’t talk enough about class and how power works in class-based societies, which is most societies. With this kind of power, you don’t even have to do anything — you know people who do you favours. You don’t have to think about things. That’s why one of the characters is unmindful in Karachi. When she reaches London, she realises she has to work harder, but she can still replicate the world of networking, favours and money there. I feel we don’t talk enough about this.

Your novel also portrays how politicians whose policies undermine diversity, representation and other such ideals have started co-opting them. Today, you have Priti Patel — born to refugees, but taking a tough stance against immigration. How do you see this unfolding?

There’s nothing new about this. If you go back to Macaulay’s Minute on Education, the objective was to create a class of Indians to do the empire’s work. Some people say, “Isn’t the diversity in the Tory party remarkable?” But I feel it’s the same old story.

My university advisor was John Edgar Wideman, a leading African-American writer. When asked about race and his success, he said that racist societies are good at creating a safety valve. You allow a few people to do well and that releases pressure. Then when someone mentions racism, you say, a Black man became the President, another won the Pulitzer. It creates a façade of equality. When someone fails, you can blame the individual. So, they look for people just to check the diversity box. A character in the novel becomes one such acceptable brown face.

Are there any issues or themes you want to engage with in your fiction but haven’t yet?

It’s not a bad question, it’s just a question outside of how fiction happens. What tends to happen is I begin working on something and as I write, I discover the stuff inside me that wants to come out. When I started this novel, I had no idea migrants and migration laws in the UK would be part of it. I’ve been engaging with the issue in different ways outside my fiction. I guess when I’m into something, it comes out in my fiction at some point. But I don’t know what will come out next.

Best of Friends is your eighth novel. How has your experience of writing changed over the years? Was there anything different about writing this novel?

In your first few novels, it’s possible to use the stuff of your life. Once you’ve used it, things become harder. Besides, the longer you write, the more you increase your ambitions, so you’re deliberately making it harder for yourself. The kind of novels I wrote 20 years ago, I could write those more easily now, but I don’t want to do that.

One thing different about this novel was that I wrote it during the pandemic. It was hard to focus because I kept going online, looking at the news and numbers. Besides, I did something I haven’t done before. I have three friends from university, Elizabeth, Terese and Pam, who are in the book’s acknowledgement. I told them I was finding it hard to sit down and work. So, we met on Zoom every day and talked about what we’d do for the next few hours. Later, we’d log on again to discuss whether we did it or not. I needed that external structure.

It was also lovely because these were friends from my grad school days. They had read and commented on my first novel’s early drafts. We didn’t discuss this novel, but we had lovely conversations around writing.

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.

A lot of research went into your last few books. Was that the case for Best of Friends too?

It had less research than the previous three novels. The section set in 1988 in Karachi was based on my experience, but there were gaps in my memory. So I would go on Twitter and ask, “Karachi people, give me the names of video shops in the 1980s.”

While the first section required little research as I had lived through it and it was about two girls in school, for the latter, I had to figure out what venture capitalists do. I knew about civil liberties groups and migrant rights, but I had to look into the legal aspects, the things people might get caught for, processes, etc. It was interesting because venture capitalism and civil liberties are such different worlds.

I like how the characters are richly detailed and encompass contradictions. I hadn’t imagined I would read about a queer brown immigrant donating to the Tories. Could you talk about how you fleshed them out?

Interestingly, with this book, both protagonists just came to my mind. Usually, that happens with one character — if you’re lucky. In this case, I had a sense of not only who they were as girls, but also who they would become later in life, along with their complexities and contradictions. Rather than figuring them out, it was as if I was looking at them and thinking: how do I put you on the page so readers get to know you.

I’m not interested in writing a stereotype. Though I guess some people conform to stereotypes, once you get to know most up close, there’s something interesting going on. Particularly if you enter a society as a migrant, to be at the centre of power, you will have to make compromises or enact blindnesses. One character exemplifies this, but even the activist is more of an establishment figure than she would like to admit.

In an interview with The Scottish Review of Books, you said, “One of the things that has always been true is that with every novel I have wanted to do something I haven’t done before. I always want to push myself further.” What did you do differently with Best of Friends?

I’m glad you asked that because with Best of Friends, I returned to the territory of my initial novels. They were all set in Karachi, in a certain milieu — people who lived within two square miles [of each other]. With this novel, I wanted to revisit that world and write it differently — with more critical awareness about how power and gender work in that world.

I’ve done jumps in novels before, but here I wanted to develop the characters and their relationship well and then jump to 30 years later. You believe they’re the same people, it’s the same friendship, but also, they’re 45 now rather than 14.

Did you have this jump in mind when you first conceived the characters or did the novel’s structure evolve?

Very much the latter. When I started writing, I knew the novel would end in the present. But I had thought it would have several sections — each might jump about five years, so it would be incremental. I tried to write it that way, but discovered I wasn’t interested in the protagonists in their twenties and thirties. I was interested in where they started as adolescents and where they are today.

What were the challenges in writing the novel?

I had to take the plunge and get rid of what I had written about the intervening years. It was useful to do that first draft because I got to live with the characters through those years. But readers didn’t need that. It wasn’t working as a piece of writing.

There was also the question of having both protagonists equally present. I not only had to balance between them, but also give them stories I could follow. I needed a reason to go from one to the other and back. In the first section, their lives run parallelly, but in the latter, they have different trajectories. So, I had to work on a sense of wholeness and unity while moving from one to the other.

Over the past decade, female friendships have figured prominently in popular culture and fiction, such as in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. Why do you think this is the case?

There still aren’t enough books about friendship compared to, say, romantic relationships or about parents and children. And I’m not just talking about female friendships — when I was growing up, my closest friend was a boy.

During adolescence, friendships are important, but in the 20s and 30s, people focus on their careers or starting a family. When they reach their 40s or so, they realise they need relationships outside the professional and familial structure — people you can rely on, but also separate from. Childhood friends often become a lifeline. They’re people who’ve always known you. You could spend months or years apart, but there’s still something solid about those.

I love the Elena Ferrante novels, but what also happens with stories of female friendships is they often end up being about sexual jealousy. I play with that idea in the novel’s first half, but move away from it because that’s not been my experience of friendship. I wanted to write against — I’m not saying write against Ferrante, who is brilliant — but write against the trope that dramatic tension in female friendships has to arise from sexual jealousy. I wanted to move away from heteronormative stories and the idea that friends have the same preferences or interests, culminating in the most basic kind of love triangle.

In a 2019 interview, you said that you don’t see much hope for the world amid rising populism and climate change. How has that influenced your fiction?

We say these things in moments and then we have other kinds of moments. I would say I’m an optimist about people, but a pessimist about the people who often get to power, especially in populist times. I don’t think I could write the books I write if I were pessimistic about human beings and their potential. I do think we’re in a terrible moment, but I feel hopeful when I go to universities and talk to the younger generation. We just need to not destroy everything until they’re old enough to make decisions (laughs).

In terms of political shifts, it’s like a pendulum. Besides, there are always people who fight back. Watching Sri Lanka right now, how people are taking to the streets… even something small, like Rajapaksa trying to escape, but the airport staff not letting him. You want to cheer at such times. There will always be resistance to the worst kind of politics.

But climate change has a point of no-return, so it’s harder to know where to feel optimistic. We have to accept that we live in a world of consequences — not everything can be made okay.

A character in the novel says, “When you live in an unjust world, you want sports to be a refuge, not a reminder.” What is your refuge from the world?

My friends, books, TV, among other things. It’s interesting with refuge… sometimes you want to be in a space where you’re not thinking about horrible things. But I also know and admire people who are fighters, on the battleground, not despondent, not giving in. There’s a kind of refuge in their company.

One thing that stood out in the novel is that if you belong to the elite, your life in Karachi is similar to your life in London. People might call Pakistan a failing state and the UK a beacon of democracy, but you show how things are not so different in the corridors of power. How do you see this shaping up in political discourse or fiction?

We still don’t talk enough about class and how power works in class-based societies, which is most societies. With this kind of power, you don’t even have to do anything — you know people who do you favours. You don’t have to think about things. That’s why one of the characters is unmindful in Karachi. When she reaches London, she realises she has to work harder, but she can still replicate the world of networking, favours and money there. I feel we don’t talk enough about this.

Your novel also portrays how politicians whose policies undermine diversity, representation and other such ideals have started co-opting them. Today, you have Priti Patel — born to refugees, but taking a tough stance against immigration. How do you see this unfolding?

There’s nothing new about this. If you go back to Macaulay’s Minute on Education, the objective was to create a class of Indians to do the empire’s work. Some people say, “Isn’t the diversity in the Tory party remarkable?” But I feel it’s the same old story.

My university advisor was John Edgar Wideman, a leading African-American writer. When asked about race and his success, he said that racist societies are good at creating a safety valve. You allow a few people to do well and that releases pressure. Then when someone mentions racism, you say, a Black man became the President, another won the Pulitzer. It creates a façade of equality. When someone fails, you can blame the individual. So, they look for people just to check the diversity box. A character in the novel becomes one such acceptable brown face.

Are there any issues or themes you want to engage with in your fiction but haven’t yet?

It’s not a bad question, it’s just a question outside of how fiction happens. What tends to happen is I begin working on something and as I write, I discover the stuff inside me that wants to come out. When I started this novel, I had no idea migrants and migration laws in the UK would be part of it. I’ve been engaging with the issue in different ways outside my fiction. I guess when I’m into something, it comes out in my fiction at some point. But I don’t know what will come out next.

Best of Friends is your eighth novel. How has your experience of writing changed over the years? Was there anything different about writing this novel?

In your first few novels, it’s possible to use the stuff of your life. Once you’ve used it, things become harder. Besides, the longer you write, the more you increase your ambitions, so you’re deliberately making it harder for yourself. The kind of novels I wrote 20 years ago, I could write those more easily now, but I don’t want to do that.

One thing different about this novel was that I wrote it during the pandemic. It was hard to focus because I kept going online, looking at the news and numbers. Besides, I did something I haven’t done before. I have three friends from university, Elizabeth, Terese and Pam, who are in the book’s acknowledgement. I told them I was finding it hard to sit down and work. So, we met on Zoom every day and talked about what we’d do for the next few hours. Later, we’d log on again to discuss whether we did it or not. I needed that external structure.

It was also lovely because these were friends from my grad school days. They had read and commented on my first novel’s early drafts. We didn’t discuss this novel, but we had lovely conversations around writing.

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.