Some books you read and feel in your gut. Puloma Ghosh’s debut story collection Mouth (Astra House, June 2024) asks to be felt all over. The eleven stories of Mouth probe the lives of their narrators, excavating their bodily desire and confronting the chasm of terror that opens when they recognize that other people may remain eternally unknowable. In “Natalya,” an autopsy provides the narrator with an opportunity to reexamine her complex feelings on a former lover. A rip in the space time continuum in “Anomaly” becomes a popular date spot. The narrator of “Lemon Boy” is adrift in her early twenties when she goes to a party, noting that there is “something horrific about facing a party alone. It made you both invisible and vulnerable at once.” In crisp prose that imagines other worlds, these stories interrogate the joys and terrors of intimacy, desire, and infatuation.
Ghosh and I first connected at the Tin House Summer Workshop a few years ago, and I was thrilled to learn that we’d get a collection full of her bold, stylish, and imaginative stories. We met in Cambridge before one of her tour events to talk about the collection, writing desire, and the force of narrative in constructing a life.
Michael Colbert (MC): I’m so excited to be talking with you about Mouth. I really loved this collection. Which story did you write first?
Puloma Ghosh (PG): A lot of the stories I wrote in grad school, a few of them I wrote before and revised in grad school, and then a few I wrote afterwards. I think the oldest story is “The Fig Tree.” It feels like my younger self, and a lot of it is taken from my life pretty strongly, which is easier to do while you’re figuring things out.
MC: Once you wrote that story, did you start to see other stories that could crop up around this to make a collection?
PG: I honestly was just writing stories because I like writing stories and that’s the easier thing to do when you’re in an MFA program versus trying to get feedback on a novel. Eventually, I had a bunch of short stories, and there were connecting threads between them. I collected the ones that felt the most cohesive or that I liked the most. There are a few that didn’t make the cut.
MC: I’ve heard it’s kind of like putting a mixtape together. One of the threads I saw running through the whole book was this idea of dating.
PG: Dating, that’s so funny.
MC: Yeah, there are a lot of these new and nascent relationships, or the narrator wants to be with someone. Were you thinking about that at all?
PG: To me, it feels less about dating—I think “Anomaly” is about dating—but I think it’s about attraction, sex, and infatuation and things like that. I feel like dating is the more formal version of that, which is present in “Anomaly” when they’re on dating apps and going on dates. I definitely think attraction is interesting and fun to write about. I’m a romance fan and I’m also a horror fan, and that I think comes across in the stories: I’m thinking about love, and I’m thinking about sex, and I’m thinking about monsters.
MC: How do you see romance and horror coming together to examine attraction or desire from different points of view?
PG: I feel like there is something really animal and bestial about attraction. I like horror that feels like unexplained things of the earth and beyond. There’s not a serial killer or a murderer or something—it’s all supernatural. I think that attraction can be similar to that. You don’t understand it, but it’s consuming, and it makes people act weird.
MC: Thinking about the supernatural and the lack of explanation there can be for phenomena, did you ever feel pressure to explicate?
PG: That is something I work on a lot in editing, I don’t naturally and immediately give all the information that’s needed. Editing, having readers, and figuring out what people are confused about initially helps me put together what needs to go in.
With a lot of the details of the world, I actually don’t know the answer. In “Desiccation,” where have they taken the men? What is the war about? I don’t know, but it’s not important for me to know. Because a lot of my stories are first person, we only know information the first-person character knows. With subtext, the reader can pick up on things that the character doesn’t know. But we can only talk about what the war is about if the protagonist knows what the war is about. It’s not hard sci-fi, or high fantasy, so the point is not all of that; the point is the characters and what the circumstances make them do.
MC: That’s a really good way of thinking about it. I’m thinking about that a lot right now in drafting a novel—how deep in the weeds to get.
PG: I think I go the opposite way for novels, though, because I know way more about the world than I necessarily need to put in, or I info dump when I’m first drafting. With short stories, I do it the other way because I feel very conscious of space.
When a reader opens a novel, I think they are settled in to think, “Okay, we’re going to meander, and I’m going to have patience.” Readers open short stories with a lot less patience, so there’s more pressure to keep their attention and not get bogged down by too much exposition.
MC: I want to talk about a couple of stories. In addition to attraction, another overarching theme I saw was the unknowability of someone else in a relationship—how much can we ever get to know someone?
PG: I think about that so much, not even just in a relationship, just in general. The unknowability of other people haunts me.
MC: You look at it in so many different ways through the book. In addition to the romantic relationships, it comes up with mothers and daughters, like in “Leaving Things.”
PG: I think about that a lot. There are a lot of mothers in my stories. I’ve always been haunted by the fact that my parents and I love each other and we try our best to understand each other, but there are certain things that we will never understand about each other because we grew up and became humans in such different circumstances. There are parts of their lives that I can’t touch, and there’s psychology that I can’t understand and vice versa. And so, that has always had me thinking about how much my parents don’t know about me and how much, conversely, I probably don’t know about them.
Then with a romantic interest, that’s part of the mystery: the not knowing, the sexiness, and then it goes from that mystery to love and something solid the more you close that gap, but I don’t think these stories are places where people are able to close that gap.
MC: And that’s a really rich tension—can I close that gap? Can I get closer to a place of knowing?
I want to look at “Anomaly,” because that emphasizes this idea of growing and developing with someone and the narrative that can hover over a relationship. What do we tell ourselves about the relationship? How well do we know someone? How over time do we change together? Were you thinking about narrative as an influence on the way that people understand their relationships?
PG: We are always creating narratives about ourselves and each other, and if you’re a writer, I feel like you do it even more. I was just talking about this with a friend of mine. We were talking about a mutual friend who has some odd behaviors, and we were trying to figure out why she did those odd behaviors. We were theorizing back and forth and then realized this is something that we’re doing as writers because we want to understand a real person as though they’re a character.
I think a fun thing about writing in first person is that you can have someone state what they think about themselves, who they are, and what’s going on around them, and then have the rest of the narrative clue the reader in that the person who’s saying this is maybe not self-aware. That, I think, is big in “Anomaly” because she believes, “I am an alone person who loves to be alone,” but it’s really like she hasn’t unpacked this big thing that happened to her.
In “Anomaly,” the circumstances are mundane, but there’s the backdrop of this crazy, extraordinary thing that is happening to the world. Everyone is trying to box those extraordinary things into the mundane and ordinary things that we already understand, and I think she’s also doing this internally with herself–boxing herself in after this extraordinary thing has happened to her. Then she walks into something so much bigger than her that she completely doesn’t understand and can’t lie to herself anymore.
MC: In that story, too, her first love stands in for life or death, and in this case there was an actual death. How do you think about relationships and mortality, or attraction and mortality, or love and mortality?
PG: I was thinking about how when you’re a teenager or in your twenties, everything is so dramatic. When you first fall in love, it feels like this huge thing. It’s like, “I can’t live without this person.” You start to construct entire futures with them, and it’s this false sense of life or death. Romeo and Juliet were just teenagers. And then we actually get to mortality, and it makes this love smaller by comparison. It doesn’t even have to be a death. It can be a breakup, right?
MC: Yeah, and a breakup is like the end of the future—you don’t have those possibilities anymore.
I also want to talk about “Lemon Boy.” How did you think about the narrator’s desire to steal or take this other person’s story? How did that become an engine for her character?
PG: I think the protagonist in “Lemon Boy” was feeling a huge emptiness in the moment of the story, and that emptiness put her in this thin place where she wants to be taken or inhabited or given some kind of life. I think his story was showing her something new. I think she’s obsessed with the holes because she has this feeling that “I am not living my life. I could disappear,” and here’s a story about someone who disappeared. So she wonders, “Could I just disappear like this person? If you disappear, where do you go? Would I come out at this party—am I even at this party? Nobody seems to be taking notice of me.”
MC: Can something take me away or make me feel differently, even if that’s a malevolent force, even if it risks my destruction or annihilation?
PG: I think that’s an overarching theme: how far will you go to feel something else?
MC: I had the pleasure of reading a draft of “Lemon Boy” at Tin House, and I was curious if you could talk about the experience of editing the collection. Were you thinking about if things need to thread together in an overarching way or could you look at each story individually?
PG: I really think of every story like its own microcosm. As far as the connections go, I feel like they come out later. I wound up calling the book Mouth because mouths came up in every single story.
I reordered it so many times, it’s been through several shuffles. Each story I worked on a different amount of time. “Fig Tree,” which came first, I worked on for seven, eight years. Then “Anomaly” was a later addition, and I worked on it for a few months. With each one, it depends on what’s going on with the story. I feel like my editing process is getting shorter as I write more stories.
MC: Can you discuss your process?
PG: I write a story, and I show it to a few people who I think will bring different things to the table. I usually ask, “What did you get out of this and what are you confused about? Where do you feel like it might be losing you?” Then I take their notes and think for a while, and I sit on them. Then I’ll start over again and rewrite it on a blank page. I’ll do that one or two times, and then once it gets a little bit tighter, my edits get smaller. It’s shocking how much a sentence can change everything, so I make my changes smaller and smaller and smaller until I get there.
MC: That is so true; you can sometimes just add the right sentence, and the story feels done.
PG: I feel like I’ve read stories and have done this with my own stories where I’ve had to just throw it away because if you edit too much, it takes the absolute life out of the story. It starts to be nonsense. I think the best and most impactful writing is the first draft, and then you just have to fix it, so the structure will hold. The first draft has your raw feeling in it, and that’s ultimately what you want the reader to feel.
Michael Colbert is a gay writer based in Maine, where he’s at work on a novel. He holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington, and his writing appears in One Story, Esquire, and NYLON, among others. Read more of his work here.
