Jhumpa Lahiri’s Writing Career Began in Stolen Notebooks

It was below freezing the other Friday morning, in Long Island City, when the author Jhumpa Lahiri walked into a nondescript brick building beneath the Queens Boulevard overpass. She was wearing a long white wool coat and maroon suède boots. “That’s her!” someone said, springing up from a bench. As Lahiri took off her coat, she was given a nametag that read “BookOps” over the logo of the New York Public Library.

The N.Y.P.L. had just acquired Lahiri’s papers, among which are school book reports, an Italian rail ticket with scribbled ideas for a novel, and a piece of fan mail from the director M. Night Shyamalan, in which he shared that he’d cried after reading “Interpreter of Maladies.”

Lahiri is only fifty-seven—on the young side for selling her archive—but she was taken with the idea of having her work kept alongside “Brontë material.” Plus, the sale is an opportunity to declutter. “I have a number of piles stacked up,” she said of her homes, in Brooklyn and Rome, and her office at Barnard. The library took about forty linear feet of stuff off her hands.

For Lahiri, the line between home and library is porous. Lahiri’s father was a cataloguer at the University of Rhode Island library. “All the scrap paper in my house was old catalogue cards,” she said. In 1986, after her sophomore year at Barnard, she got a part-time job at the N.Y.P.L.’s main branch. “I was hired to sit on a stool and count the number of people going into the main exhibit.” She recalled: “It was on children’s literature.” Now her own childhood writing and the rest of her materials will be stored in a vault under Bryant Park that’s kept at a steady temperature of sixty-three degrees and a relative humidity of forty-eight per cent.

In a small conference room, Lahiri met with the curator Carolyn Vega to look through some of the folders from the archive. Laid out on a table was a drawing from the fifth grade of a black cat. “I don’t know why this one ended up surviving,” she said. “I never had a cat. I never really thought about cats.” Next to it was Lahiri’s first book, “The Life of a Weighing Scale,” which she “self-published” in 1976, at the age of nine. “There was a contest in my elementary school,” she said. “Everyone had to write a book. The prize was that it got to be in the school library.” She skimmed the browned pages. The story, which she wrote in the fourth grade, is told from the point of view of a bathroom scale. In one scene, the scale gets rained on from an open window. “It’s pouring right on me, poor me. I better push myself over,” the scale says. Lahiri smiled and said, “I would say there are little hints of Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory here—nascent.”

On the next table was a book report with a big red apple drawn on the cover alongside the title “Manhattan.” Lahiri was around ten when she drew it, but New York beckoned. “I grew up in a tiny provincial place in New England,” she said. “There were times when I felt like a total freak of nature because of the way I felt that my family was perceived. We were so conspicuous.” Lahiri loved acting in plays but was typically cast as the villain—the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland.” “I think that was partly because I wasn’t blond and white, to cut to the chase,” she said, pointing at a school script for “Oliver Twist,” in which she played Fagin, the evil pickpocket. “I had three and a half solos,” she said, reading her old notes on the script.

The casting, actually, was apt: Lahiri liked to swipe extra notebooks from school closets. “While the teachers would be out to smoke a cigarette, I would sort of very stealthily go and take one or two. My first dishonest act.” Her early attempts at fiction were written in those notebooks, mostly “stories about the victims of mean girls,” she said, gesturing at one that she’d titled “Jeanette.” She went on, “I didn’t show these things to any adults, including even my parents. And I clearly couldn’t show them to my teachers, because they were written in these stolen notebooks.”

Spotting a computer printout of “Roman Stories,” from 2022, she shuddered at the sight of Track Changes in the margins. “They’re violent,” she said. “And ugly.” She still prefers writing in notebooks. She opened up “Jeanette” and observed how she had numbered the pages, leaving many blank.

Vega interjected, “Virginia Woolf did the same thing.” (Lahiri’s papers will now join Woolf’s in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature.)

“I thought the best, most amazing thing I could possibly do with myself would be to get to the end of one of these notebooks,” Lahiri said. “All I wanted to do with my life was fill the pages.” ♦