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Thrity Umrigaris the author of seven novels Everybody's Son, The Story Hour, The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time; a memoir, First Darling of the Morning; and a children's picture book, When I Carried You in My Belly. A former journalist, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and was a finalist for the PEN Beyond Margins Award. A professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Thrity Umrigar's website
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Tell us a little bit about your growing up years.
Well, I was born in Bombay and lived there until I was 21, when I came to the
U.S. I was raised in a joint family, which meant I grew up around very loving
aunts and uncles. And since I was an only child, it helped to have all those
extra adults in my life, for love and guidance. I've always had many sets of
parents and even today, have a knack for "adopting" parents.
What do you remember most about growing up in Bombay?
I have two overriding childhood memories or impressions: One, was always
being excruciating aware of the poverty around me. Now, as a middle-class kid,
you're not supposed to be that aware of--or certainly not supposed to be
tortured by--the poverty around you. It's a defense mechanism of sorts, to be
able to ignore it. For whatever reason, I was never able to ignore it and to
some extent, it really affected my childhood, made me a hypersensitive child.
Two, I always wrote. Writing was my way to make sense of the world outside
and inside my home. Despite the recollections of the adults in my life, I don't
think I was a terribly articulate child. Writing was a way to give wings to the
inchoate emotions and ...
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