When Vauhini Vara’s This is Salvaged (W.W. Norton, 2023) arrived at my doorstep, I couldn’t wait to tear through the slim collection. Vara is a master storyteller, but more than that, she is the keeper of grief and shame dealt with in masterful strokes of directness, strangeness, and fearlessness.
I have been enthralled by Vara’s writing for years, especially with her now well-known piece “Ghosts” in The Believer, where she used a ChatGPT-like AI program to help investigate her feelings on her sister’s death from Ewing’s sarcoma that helped her delve deeper into her grief. As a cancer diagnostics science person myself and as a writer who embraces technology, Vara’s essay showed restraint, curiosity, and her ability to hold the story to ensure she told readers what needed to be understood.
Vara, a former Wall Street Journal tech reporter and business editor for The New Yorker, made her debut with 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist The Immortal King Rao, which transcended literary and speculative fiction, mixing the future with the past while asking the philosophical question of the meaning of life through a contemporary literary lens.
While The Immortal King Rao obliterates boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, simultaneously addressing the question of life, and how our actions may take us next, This Is Salvaged is a love letter to middle-class grief, the shame of addiction, the loss of a sibling, survivor’s guilt and the survivor’s triumph. It’s also an exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, the need to belong and be loved—and yet, celebrating the outlier in each vividly developed character.
Each of the ten stories in This is Salvaged features characters wanting to belong, hold on, and manage their guilt and shame—whether they’re teenagers working as phone sex operators, a sister competing to be a loving aunt, someone consuming the ashes of her own dead sister, or even the stranger trying to be liked by her partner’s young daughter.
I connected with Vara via email on this collection, her writing process, what she looks for when constructing a story that’s complicated and yet comforting, and what writers she recommends we read.
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The Rumpus: In your interview for the Center for Fiction with Celeste Kaufman, you noted your father as saying, “Why do you keep writing short stories? You should write a novel!” –which is how your amazing award-winning novel, The Immortal King Rao, started. So while the stories came first, the novel took over. Tell us the journey to both, and where does your heart lie now?
Vauhini Vara: I became a writer through short stories, which I started writing when I was in college. My first creative writing class at Stanford was with the brilliant short-story writer and later novelist Adam Johnson, and after that I was hooked. As it turns out, I was also lucky enough to go to college—and become close friends with—a bunch of people who ended up pursuing writing as their vocation: Alice Sola Kim, Anthony Ha, Anna North, Esmé Weijun Wang, Jenny Zhang, Karan Mahajan, Kathleen Founds, and Tony Tulathimutte, to name some of them. It was through writing and reading alongside these friends that I found my voice and felt empowered to write both my story collection and my novel.
To me, it doesn’t feel necessary to choose between genres—stories, novels, whatever. I didn’t publish my first book until I was thirty-nine; before that, I made a living as a journalist. Nowadays, I’m still working as a journalist, and I’m also writing an essay collection and a stage adaptation of my essay “Ghosts.” I’m starting to draft my next novel too. I don’t know how to describe in words how each piece I write ends up feeling like a natural fit for one genre or the other, but it’s somehow always really clear to me. My heart is with all of it.
Rumpus: “The Irates,” the first story in the collection, addresses the death of a sibling from the perspective of Swati, who works with “the irates” as a telemarketer calling up people who were irate, angry for a multitude of reasons, while dealing with her grief. You’ve dealt with your own life moved by the grief of losing your sister, which you’ve addressed in the Believer essay. Do you think you write the story of loss and grief over and over in different ways? Or, when you’re writing an essay or short story and you start to explore another theme, do grief and loss pull you back? How did this story come about, and what was the fundamental question you were asking with it?
Vara: That story is set in the summer and fall of 2001, leading up to and including 9/11. In it, a pair of best friends are spending the summer in Seattle working in telemarketing after the death of the protagonist’s older brother. As it happens, 2001 was also the year that my older sibling died—my sister—and, the following summer and fall, leading up to and including 9/11, my best friend and I worked in telemarketing in Seattle. The story ends up being, I believe, about how trauma is experienced both individually and collectively—its relationship with both isolation and unity.
Rumpus: The order of stories or essays in collections make them what they are as a whole. How do you organize yours, and did you have a structure, an arc you wanted to follow in the collection? If so, what was your guide?
Vara: I started writing stories when I was nineteen, and I’ve written a lot since then—many more than are in this collection. In reviews of the collection so far, it’s described as being largely about loss and grief, which I realize only now is true; when I was putting the collection together, what I most noticed about these particular stories is the way in which they each include characters who are trying really desperately to connect with one another using whatever imperfect tools they have available to them. Spirituality and religion, too, felt important to the collection.
Rumpus: “Any addict who says she’s not ashamed is lying to you or to herself. It makes matters worse if you don’t fit the stereotype.” To say I loved, the story “I, Buffalo,” in this collection would be an understatement. You create characters that are relentless in who they are, uncomfortable in what they do, and yet steadfast in what makes them, them. Tell us about the process in how you created Sheila.
Vara: I mean, this one time in graduate school, to be honest, I woke up to the smell of vomit in my apartment and didn’t remember where it was from. I had drunk too much the previous night. Sheila—who is an alcoholic to whom the same thing happens but with much more drama—was born out of that. At the time that I first drafted the story in my mid-twenties, I was fascinated by the line between order and disorder, control and chaos. And I think the story is in part about that. It’s also a love letter to San Francisco, where I lived for a long time. At the time that I wrote the story, Big Tech and other corporate interests were reshaping the city dramatically, and, for me, that was an important backdrop.
Rumpus: I’d love to understand your editing process. For “I, Buffalo,” how did you decide what needed editing out?
Vara: I did end up going back to some edits with “I, Buffalo”—from back in 2013, when I was most intensely working on the story—and I had a much more convoluted beginning:
You’ll call me a liar. But I haven’t lied in years. Not since the day I took an oath, long ago, to behave in a manner consistent with the truth. After, I told people this had been the most significant moment of my life. They laughed. That’s depressing, they said. And many of these people were my colleagues who, too, had taken the oath. They themselves didn’t even remember having taken the oath, they said. You want to talk about depressing? I said. In those days, I had a paper framed on my wall which featured my name alongside the oath, all in that earnest leaning font common to such documents. I found the language strange — that I behave not necessarily in a truthful manner but only in a manner consistent with the truth — but after a while I got used to it.
After some years, I realized that my recollection of having taken the oath had disappeared. This wasn’t a problem until the paper I mentioned was declared moot, at which point I lost the evidence of the oath as well as the memory of having taken it. I have begun, since then, to suspect that the most significant moment of my life had never happened at all.
Still I know some facts consistent with the truth.
I am a 36-year-old woman.
I live in a San Francisco apartment, recently vacated . . .
And I condensed that significantly, to just get to the point—to start the story.
Rumpus: This collection deeply delves into shame, its existence, and how the characters deal with it in life. Was there any story in this collection that surprised you as an author and made you wonder if a character took a life of their own during the process?
Vara: Oh, all of them! For me, writing about each of these characters was an exercise in understanding who exactly they were. I don’t think I went into any of these stories with a plan to write about shame or any other particular emotional state. I more often tend to start with an image or concept and just start writing and seeing where it takes me—which ends up being informed by who the characters end up being.
Rumpus: “You Are Not Alone” is spectacular. You’ve chosen to keep main characters nameless or used descriptors instead. This makes them much more accessible and alive. You do the same with “The Eighteen Girls.” Tell us how this came about, and was this a craft option you exercised or was it organic? Would you prefer to do that again?
Vara: Ah, thanks for the nice words about it. For me, it’s hard to distinguish the line between what’s conscious and subconscious when it comes to writing. So in “You Are Not Alone,” the main character is referred to only as “the girl.” And then with “The Eighteen Girls,” there are, as the title suggests, eighteen girls—“the first girl,” “the second girl,” and so on—who, as you go through the story, you realize are different versions of the same character.
With each of those, I don’t remember a moment where I decided it should be that way, which isn’t to say there wasn’t a moment, just that I don’t remember there being one. What I can say in retrospect is that in both stories, the choice of narrative perspective is very much tied to the subject matter. “You Are Not Alone” is a story of a child who feels as if she’s looking at herself from the outside in and is trying to reconcile the version of herself who is looking with the one who she’s looking at, for example. And “The Eighteen Girls” is, similarly, about how identity is not fixed. It changes with time and experience.
Rumpus: Writers love to get insights from other writers on their process. I am assuming your process for writing short stories is different from a novel. Was it and, if so, what was it that stands out to you?
Vara: Stories for me are much more like poems than like novels—that is, each of the stories in this collection started with just a vague impression: an experience or imagined vision of one that stuck with me and called to be written down.
Rumpus: The cover of This Is Salvaged is so very hypnotic in its starkness, with the withering flower as the only image. What was your influence on the cover, and what might other writers expect of the process of selecting their book covers?
Vara: I love the wilted flower! My editor actually had sent me some potential covers to look at, and none of them felt quite right. Then—I can’t remember how—the idea of a wilted flower came to me. I sent my editor some images of wilted flowers that I’d seen, but, for the actual execution of the cover, all credit goes to the artist.
Rumpus: Deesha Philyaw said [of the collection], “A brilliant, deeply satisfying collection.” And Sarah Thankam Mathews calls this “. . . haunting, moving and wise. . . .” Tell us your experience with asking for blurbs, the selection process and how it came together.
Vara: I’ve been lucky with blurbs. I emailed some writers I admire a lot and asked them if they’d be interested in reading and potentially writing something about the collection. With real generosity and kindness, they all came through.
Rumpus: Who are the up-and-coming writers and also the ones [who have been around and should be celebrated] we should be reading in contemporary fiction, and why?
Vara: Here are some books that came out not long before mine—and others that are coming out soon—that are on my must-read list. From writers who should be better known: Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility; Brando Skyhorse’s My Name is Iris; Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story; Myriam Gurba’s Creep; Isle McElroy’s People Collide; C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey; Justin Torres’s Blackouts; Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine; Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade; and Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind.
And from a couple of writers who are already really well known, but for good reason: Zadie Smith’s The Fraud; Yiyun Li’s Wednesday’s Child; and Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds. As long as this list is, it represents only a fraction of the writers whose books I’m excited to read.
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Author photograph by Andrew Altschul
