In This Beautiful, Ridiculous City: A Graphic Memoir (Ten Speed Graphic, 2025), Kay Sohini writes about her reverse homecoming—that is, moving to New York City from Calcutta to become an artist and discover a sense of belonging. The book is, in part, a coming-of-age story, but it is also a book about a love of reading and how literature shapes us. Notably, the graphic memoir employs the De Luca effect: instead of allocating one scene per panel like a traditional comic strip, the characters move through time and space across a single background, freeing the reader’s eye to explore without a predetermined reading order. This allows Sohini to incorporate literary figures and their quotes outside of the narrative frame, putting herself in direct conversation with the greats, as we all do when we read. “Literature speaks to us figuratively,” Sohini writes, “which leaves room for projection.”
Similarly, Sohini’s lack of traditional panels creates space for breathing room and resonance as the reader parses difficult subject matter such as intimate partner violence and suicide. The book also explores hope as a mode of moving through difficulty. Sohini examines her own hope and the realities of living in New York City, the difficulties and pitfalls. Is it possible to find a middle ground, a livable reality, between one’s hopes and fears? Is it possible to make a life, and a living, as an artist in New York?
I sat down with Sohini over Zoom, where we discussed migration, Shah Rukh Khan, the De Luca effect, female ancestors, New York City, and comics as a container for complexity.
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The Rumpus: I love how you depict New York City not as a place but as a relationship—one that you first experience through literature and film and then through real life. Can you talk about the thrall of New York City over your imagination?
Kay Sohini: I was raised in an impossibly small town, and I have always been fascinated by big cities, which, to me, represent hope, freedom, movement, and dreams. This book is a homecoming in reverse. To explain what I mean, I have to first say that I am a huge fan of diasporic graphic novels, such as The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. But my feelings about belonging are a little unusual in the sense that when I arrived in New York, all my problems began to melt away, and I did not experience a massive culture shock or even a sense of displacement. I was so familiar with this city through books, music, TV, and all the stuff I’d encountered from back home. When I was leaving home, I was in an extremely dark place, and the city gave me a new lease of life. All those deep feelings of not belonging were weighing me down. Instead of being based in the diaspora, they were based in the homeland, which is sort of like diasporic novels, but in reverse. I wanted to dig deeper into this reversal aspect of belonging and write about it.
Rumpus: Alongside your personal coming-of-age narrative, you explore the globalization of India’s economy, the influence of popular culture, and your deep love for Shah Rukh Khan—a love shared by many!. How do you see this cultural exploration working alongside your personal material?
Sohini: I was trying to write a book about finding my place in the world, and that doesn’t happen without all these influences. I grew up without cable TV. At what point did I become so obsessed with New York City? And why did I think I could make it here? Coming from a very humble background, I was like, “What if I could be an artist in the biggest city in the world, where everybody else wants to be an artist?” I remember the first time I saw Shah Rukh Khan, and he was running like the wind. He was on fire. I remember thinking, “Oh, he must be so brave to put himself through this, and I want to be brave like that when I grow up.” I did grow up and started reading about Shah Ruh Khan, and I learned it was a real scene. He did not use a stuntman. They had set him on fire, and it was weirdly inspirational. When I was going through a tough phase, I remember being taken by the fact that he really believed, even though the world is not a meritocracy, that we can do anything we want to. Without that outlook, I would not have been able to leave Calcutta, and my life would not be what it is today. But I will say, I think he’s a bit too optimistic because things worked out for him. I’m not that optimistic. But I guess without hope, what else do we have, right?
Rumpus: The hope of New York City, of becoming an artist, brings balance to the book’s more difficult subject matter, like intimate partner violence and suicide. How did the comic form allow you to access these stories in a way that other forms might not have?
Sohini: When I decided that I would write about my ex, I wondered how I was going to depict traumatic memories and physical violence. I didn’t want to write explicitly about it, so I figured that drawing it and using visual metaphors, creating what I felt on the page visually, would help me get there instead. In a way, drawing autobiographical comics is the closest you can get to seeing an overview of your life. It offers a distance because it takes so long to draw. There is also a unique efficacy to relying on two modes of communication to recall certain traumatic memories as they try to resist or slip away. At some point, I realized that there are certain things that I can’t really write about. I must evoke the scene visually.
Rumpus: Can we talk about the De Luca effect, where comic characters are repeated moving across a single background, giving the sense of time passing? As a poet, I was struck by how this allowed for both the concision of language and a visual density of information. The De Luca effect also seems to create a more associative movement through time instead of a purely narrative one. Why did you choose to employ this in your work?
Sohini: When we read comics and see two panels, we imagine what is happening between the two panels—we make a connection between them in our heads, even though it’s not on the page. I started thinking a lot about how comics are deceptively simple. It’s really a complex medium if you are willing to exploit its affordances. I wanted to not just tell a story with pictures, I really wanted the medium to help me tell the story in a better way. I feel that the way time works in comics is so conducive to representing stories about trauma because time is all over the place. Traumatic memories are not linear, and they come in waves. I find it easier to mimic the movement of trauma in a visual comic format rather than in prose. I feel like grief manipulates the very fabric of time, what I call “Grief Time.” I find this easier to explain in comics, where the medium sort of combines the sensory register of images with the narrative clarity of prose.
Rumpus: In your acknowledgments, you write about drawing for twelve hours a day for six months. Can you talk a bit more about that process?
Sohini: I thought about the story for months or years on end, really. And then one fine day, I felt like it was all in my head, and I just started writing it. I had the script written out first, and then I started going in and thumbnailing the whole thing. Then I did the sketches, and then I think at some point I started to figure out what my color scheme would be. I was still learning how to make comics and was trying to make sure that it looked like one person had drawn it. I finished the script in March of 2023. After that, I started drawing and basically drew for twelve hours a day. I have a very supportive spouse. He did all the cooking and cleaning while I was just hunched over the desk. I think I finished it in December of 2023 and revised it for like three to five months till it was ready to be out in the world.
Rumpus: How did you decide that you wanted to work with comics?
Sohini: It started during my PhD in the fall of 2017. Nick Sousanis had just completed this doctoral dissertation called Unflattening, and it was the first doctoral dissertation that was drawn as a comic in the United States. It became huge. It was then published by Harvard University Press. I read it and was in love with it. It was fascinating. I got lucky because my mentors at Stony Brook, Lisa Diedrich and Jeffrey Santa Ana, were extremely supportive of my dream to work with comics, and they let me draw my dissertation. At some point, I reached out to Nick, and he became a mentor and an external examiner. That’s how I started doing it. And later I realized that outside of my dissertation, I really wanted to tell this story, but without the dissertation, I wouldn’t have learned how to work in this medium.
Rumpus: What do you think is special about the comic genre? What can comics do that no other genre can?
Sohini: I think we respond to visuals without meaning to. The immediacy of visuals and our ability to just register them without scrutiny is really fascinating to me. I think it’s why short-form videos are also popular right now. And why illustrations and comics are used to explain complex topics. I’m deeply invested in experimenting with the visual grammar of comics and finding its many affordances.
Rumpus: You bring in many of your family members into this story. Could you share a bit about how you navigated writing about your family and sharing this project with them?
Sohini: My father reads a lot, and he’s more open about the idea of writers just using their lives to write about things. He was the one who actually read the draft, and he told my mother about it. I don’t know what he said, but she’s okay with it, as is the rest of my family. My grandmother hasn’t read it, of course, and my other family members haven’t read it. But yeah, I have their blessing in a larger sense. But I’ll find out when I take this back home next summer and see.
Rumpus: Was getting this blessing important to your writing process?
Sohini: It was sort of a difficult conversation because when I was writing the script, I really did not think about being perceived by the world. I had to write. The closer I got to the publication date, I was like, “This is something that is being and will be read by strangers. Who will they perceive me as?” It’s just an unnerving thing to think about, and I guess doubly so for them because they didn’t write it. They were just in the story because I chose to write about them.
Rumpus: One of the quotes that I wrote down from the book was from toward the end where you write, “They say it takes a village. What they do not say is how the village is run on the backs of women who give up their dreams to make space for those of their husbands, to raise children, and to ceaselessly cater to the needs of others.” Can you talk about those women, generational changes, and how you see yourself in relation to the women before you?
Sohini: That’s a hard one because it’s about my grandmothers and my mother. They are all creative people, and they never got to pursue their dreams. They were raised in and surrounded by a very patriarchal society, but they never held me back. And for that, I’m really grateful. I guess it’s part of where my optimism comes from because, while I’m aware that things are bad and unequal, my life is still unimaginable, even to them. So, I have to be grateful for it while also dealing with the nuances of living in a late capitalist society. But the other thing is that my grandmothers raised me on stories. I used to be a very colicky child. I guess I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I just kept crying so my mother would get sick of me because, poor woman, she needed a break. I mentioned this in the book, but my maternal grandparents’ house is right next to mine, and there is a thin wall between the two houses, but it’s so skinny it hardly matters. We grew up with this huge joint family, and whenever my mother got sick of me crying or not eating, she would just hand me to one of my grandparents and they would tell me stories about their life and their childhood and how they grew up climbing trees and learning how to swim by, just holding onto a pitcher when nobody would teach them. They have never left where I grew up, but in a way, they taught me how to dream. It’s bittersweet, really, because my maternal grandmother died a couple of years back.
Rumpus: What do you think she would say now to you? How would she feel about your book?
Sohini: I think she would be happy. I know my paternal grandmother is happy. She’s the only remaining grandparent that I have. I mean, she doesn’t fully get it. She doesn’t understand comics. She associates comics with the comic strips that used to be in newspapers. So, she doesn’t really understand what I mean when I say it’s a whole book of comics. But she has already asked me to bring a copy home so that she can see it.
Rumpus: What are you working on now? What is next for you?
Sohini: I am drawing another comic book that’s under contract, so that is my immediate next project after this. But I am also working on a graphic novel on time, where I explore my concept of “Grief Time” at length.
Rumpus: Is there a wish or a hope that you have for this book as it goes out into the world, as it finds its readers?
Sohini: I know comics are popular right now, but I hope that more people see comics as not just something that is great for superheroes or young adult stories but something that we can really do anything with. Another thing that I find fascinating about comics is the way we can incorporate literary references to simultaneously give a tribute to the original work while being generative. That’s how I feel about drawing Bechdel or trying to incorporate her into my story because she is a very relevant part of my experience. And you can do that! You can literally place Bechdel’s character in your story. So that’s fascinating to me, along with formal choices like De Luca effect and how we can play with time and space within a frame or on a page. Those are just some of the many fascinating and cool things that you can do with comics. I hope more people find comics and love them the way I do.
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Author photograph courtesy of Kay Sohini
