Occasionally his family would leave the city to visit a bungalow community of other Russian immigrants upstate, and he’d feel at home.
There are trysts, betrayals and a social media campaign trashing a famous member of the group.
Before I was writing Our Country Friends, which is set during the pandemic, I was working on a funny, dystopian novel about a future in which half of Manhattan has been overtaken by New York University, NYU, and is now run as this kind of gigantic city-state of its own.
I know so many people who have changed careers, who have changed their conception of themselves and sometimes their conception of themselves in relation to their friends.
And I would say at least way more than half of my friends are also of immigrant backgrounds, roughly the same kind of people that populate this book — Korean Americans, Gujarati Americans, other folks from the subcontinent.
It hurt to urinate for years, and quite a bit later last year in the middle of the pandemic, toward August/September, without getting too graphic about it, the surgery’s mistakes reasserted themselves and I ended up having a second surgery in which a nerve in that very sensitive region was cut.
There’s going to be no botched circumcisions in this novel, I can guarantee that right now, but in the middle of all that, the tone of the book, I think, began to change a little bit.
And I think when you turn on certain channels in the United States, it is clear both to the persons pronouncing the lie that he or she is lying, and then it’s just a question of training the audience to believe that lie as well.