“The Vibrant Years” Is a Colorful Meditation on Work, Love, and Life for Three Generations of Women

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Katie O’Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Katie O'Connor, and today I'm so excited to be speaking with bestselling author Sonali Dev about her latest book, The Vibrant Years. Welcome, Sonali.

Sonali Dev: Hi. Thank you so much for being here, everyone. I'm excited about this.

KO: So, first, I want to say congratulations. The Vibrant Years is the first book to be released by Mindy Kaling as part of her new imprint, Mindy's Book Studio. Can you just take us to the beginning? How did you find out that you'd been selected?

SD: Oh my gosh. I think in lifetime events, memorability, and having your mind blown, this might be up there with birthing my kids, getting married, that sort of thing. It's actually a bit of a funny story because my editor emails me on a Thursday and says, "I have some great news, but I can't tell you until Monday."

KO: What a tease.

SD: I know. So, I was like, "Come on, that's just not fair." And she said, "Well, trust me, it's going to be good. I really can't tell you yet. But it's going to be good. You're not going to be upset with me on Monday." And sure enough, I was, for the first time in my life, I think, entirely silent. The words were completely shocked out of me. It was amazing. It was amazing. Mindy, you know, there's that whole piece where she's a celebrity and she has reach and all of that, but I think personally, for me, I feel like she's someone who has changed the game for diverse creators over the past two decades. And we see a lot of her now, but she has been at this for a while, and those of us who've been dreaming about this for a while, it's been really important to see someone make inroads, right?

That's one piece of it. And the other piece of it is just the actual work she does. So, her writing, her way of combining humor with emotion and with relationships and with things that matter to women and just culture, and all of that has been so close to my heart and so parallel with what I have wanted to do that, specifically, I think the fact that this was Mindy was best-case scenario. You know when we manifest and visualize what we want, and I really believe in that, and we ask the universe for what we want, this would have been the thing I asked for, and this was. It's incredibly meaningful that it's Mindy and that it kicks off her publishing imprint. All of it is just really special and I couldn't even tell you how grateful I am.

KO: That's amazing. And I think what you said about Mindy taking humor and applying that to life and relationships, we see that in your writing. It's easy to see why there was this attraction there for her between your shared kind of storytelling in that way. So, what has the partnership been like since you got that mysterious email and then the news a few days later?

SD: It's been a dream. I think her entire team is incredibly professional and also incredibly nice in terms of making me as an author and as a person feel really special, really being there every step of the way and being really detail-oriented and involved in every little thing, from the edits to all of the marketing plans and all of that. This is my ninth book, so I've been at this for a bit; longer than a few and less than others. But this is one time when I have felt entirely taken care of and embraced and like I'm in good hands, which, to be perfectly honest, in publishing is a thing we all want and don't always get.

"Mindy [Kaling]... I feel like she's someone who has changed the game for diverse creators over the past two decades... Those of us who've been dreaming about this for a while, it's been really important to see someone make inroads."

It's been really great. And given that this is the first book in the imprint, I think we're all kind of really delighted, and it's wondrous to be starting something. Everybody has that sense of starting something new, that sense of wonder, that sense of excitement, which really feeds the energy when you're bringing something like this out. So, it's been wonderful. I only have superlatives to describe it.

But I do agree that it is the whole thing they say about effort meeting opportunity, right? My previous books have spanned from being highly romantic to being highly dark to being a true rom-com, all of that. But I think this particular book was so in tune with the kind of work Mindy has been doing recently. And that of course was two of us in our own universes, it just was one of those magical things that happened where she at this point was doing this thing, and I at this point was doing this thing, and those two things came together in this very synergistic way. So, it's been delightful.

KO: Well, we're all benefiting from that meeting.

SD: Thank you.

KO: So, The Vibrant Years is told from three alternating points of view: Bindu, a grandmother with a mysterious new inheritance who's now living in an upscale Florida retirement community; her daughter-in-law, Aly; and her tech genius granddaughter, Cullie. And each woman really has their own distinct voice. So, I was curious, how did you approach it with your writing? Did you write in order as the story went, or did you perhaps stay with one character if you were sort of in a groove with one for a while and stuck with them through a few chapters?

SD: You know, in terms of process, structure of a novel is important to me, but it isn't always clear to me when I start. And I'm also a rhythm person, in terms of writing. Even as a reader, I want sentences to sound a certain way. I want there to be a beat to when characters appear. I think all of that has meaning. How many times a character appears in a book kind of signals to the reader who this is about and who we're following the most and things like that. And so, in this particular book, all three of them are pivotal in every way, and I wanted that rhythm of their thoughts, their actions, all of it, in this lovely little triplet rhyme. That's how I wanted it to happen.

That's work, that's refinement at the end of it, but when I was writing, there's the bigger piece of the entire story playing out. Where you are brought into the story is not always where that story starts, and in this case, obviously, the story really starts, I mean, I could say when Bindu is born, but really, when a certain thing happens to Bindu when she is 17. If that incident didn't happen, this entire story would unfold differently, but that's not where you're brought in. That's where you're leading to, so you understand what's happening today. So, structurally, all of those pieces happen together. Because rhythm matters to me, I tried to write it as one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three, which is Bindu, Cullie, Aly; Bindu, Cullie, Aly. That's how I tried to write it, but I did have to break from that.

I do write in spurts. So, when something about a story fills me up, I'll go to bed, I'll dream about something, and then that scene is filling me up and I will write it down. It's a little bit of all that. But the main thing is to know the story from day one, when this thing happens all those years ago, to where it's going to end up. This is the sweeping arc that I kind of know. And then as I'm tracing that arc, I write some scenes out of order, but I do know then, in the end, it's going to have to come down to this rhythm of one, two, three; one, two, three. With this book, I did know that, and so it was kind of a combination of all of that.

KO: It's so interesting to hear you say that you write with rhythm, that that beat matters to you, because I think that has to be part of why everyone loves your audiobooks so much. Just that emphasis on that sound and that rhythm I think really comes through while you're listening to the story as well. Did you find yourself gravitating towards a particular character while you were writing, amongst your heroines?

SD: A little secret, which is not going to be such a secret, I think, soon, is that this was my first book that I think has pieces that are overtly autobiographical. So, you asked before, in your previous question, about voices and the voices of these three women. I am a 50-year-old woman who has been married for 26 years. I have a daughter who is 21, and I have a mom who is 70. And I'm really close to both of them. And so it's very close to my life in terms of the lives of three women and how they interact, although, fortunately or unfortunately, the drama levels are less than they are in the book [laughs]. But having said that, Bindu I think is the character that sometimes I feel like I was born to write.

All my life, I have wanted to do that. When you've written it, you feel like, "Okay, this is a character that I really am proud of. She is who I want to be when I grow up. She is how I feel like a lot of my girlfriends are going to age." And a lot of this had to do with, in the aging process, in books, finding older people as stereotypes, coming up against them, coming up against women beyond a certain age as either the naughty, bawdy grandma or then the wise, graceful giver of all things, and those feel very cardboard to me. They don't feel like complete people. And when I think about my friends, my girlfriends and I, being that age, or even when my mom was that age, there was so much more nuance and depth and wholeness to those characters. And so, most certainly, I wanted to write a woman like that. I wanted to write that aspect where your sexuality does not one fine day just disappear and your relationship with your body and yourself does not one fine day disappear.

So, Bindu was so much of what I wanted to say about being a woman and all the women I had seen growing up. But I think Aly for me was really talking about marriage and not just marriage with your spouse, but marriage with the families, because I do believe that marriage is, while it is between two people, it really is about bringing together two universes in terms of family and culture. Because even if you're from exactly the same culture, every family is its own subculture, and bringing all of that together and how we're taught to do that, how we end up doing that and what it brings to your life, and also the challenges of it, right?

As an artist who hopes to feed herself one day, it's a hard fight to fight; it is entirely unpredictable. You have no idea if all your work is going to pay off, and so the support of your family and your spouse is incredibly important, and yet, as a spouse, it is a hard thing to give because you're part of the sacrifice without wanting the dream, really. It's not your dream and yet you have to make the sacrifices that go with it. Whenever I hear other authors or artists and actors, when you hear them do their interviews and talk, you always hear them talk about the support of their spouse, and I'm like, "This cannot possibly be true that every single person has a spouse who has no problem with them getting so obsessed with this thing and all of that." And so I think it is not that simple, and I wanted to explore that a little bit. A lot of my own experience with that is in Aly's experience.

"Bindu I think is the character that sometimes I feel like I was born to write."

And I think I am a little bit of all three women. Bindu, obviously, is who we all want to be when we grow up, but I do think Aly, in terms of wanting something and having it withheld and not be easy in those terms, very much is me. And I think that slightly outsider-y feeling that—and I think everybody is that in their twenties, you don't feel like you're like everyone else—in those terms, I'm very much Cullie. I always felt like I was a little bit on the outside, and yet, things came easy to me and yet they were all difficult, you know? That whole thing with Cullie. I think, generationally, it is very much my life experience. I am in this book more than I think I have been in any of my other books.

KO: I do want to dig in more on that career and love piece that you're talking about with Aly, but before I get there, I wanted to ask another side of this autobiographical approach. I love the multigenerational arc, and it did feel really fresh, particularly because of Bindu and just the way that you show so many sides of her personality. I agree, I also want to be Bindu. I was feeling very gray today, and I was like, "Go put color on your lips. Go put something in your hair. You gotta sparkle, like her," you know? But you dedicate your book to grandmothers everywhere and, particularly, to your grandmothers. And I was curious if they helped serve as well as any sort of inspiration for The Vibrant Years?

SD: Absolutely. I think for me, personally, my grandmothers were a huge influence in my life. I was incredibly close to them both. I was very fortunate that they both reached their nineties and were with me for a good amount of my life. Very, very grateful for that. One of my grandmothers was a doctor, a medical doctor. She went to medical school in colonized India. This was a time when around the world, women, if you finished high school, it was a big deal; we're talking about the 1930s. So, you can imagine this was a person with very unique strength, very unique experiences in terms of having to assert herself. She was a doctor in a time when anyone who looked at her obviously assumed she was a nurse, so she was constantly having to assert herself, and yet asserting herself too much took away from her femininity and the fact that she was a mom. She was doing this balancing act long before it became a part of all of our lives, right? And so those influences have stayed with me. Those are very much part of my identity. I will always be my grandmothers' granddaughter. And so when people say, "Oh, you can be anyone you want to be and do anything you want to do," it's just a thing people say, but my grandmother was delivering babies in villages in India in the '30s—in 1930 [laughs], and we're almost coming to 2030.

KO: Wow.

SD: And she made it real, you know? Having opinions about things; sports and politics and all of that. She was that kind of grandmother. My other grandma had a degree in literature, and my love for books came from her. She was absolutely in love with Mr. Rochester. She was talking about the nuances of heroes and all of that since I was three, you know? And so my childhood was spent, summers with her, reading from Jane Eyre to me and from Count of Monte Cristo. I'm my grandmother's granddaughter. And it is a huge part of my identity. If only they could read this book. Having said that, they were very nontraditional women in traditional roles. And I think writing Bindu, that's the whole point of it. We now have all these choices. The conditioning doesn't go away; it's not a button. We have to do the work to drop the conditioning, whether we are 65, whether we are 47, whether we are 25. We all carry it.

That's how this thing gets complicated. And also the dating scene thing, for me, was exactly that. It's an amazing, ironic metaphor for how far women have come. I mean, who would've thought in my mother's generation, even when I was younger, that you could, at your fingertips, make choices like that. And yet, has it made things easier? Nobody who is on the dating scene will say that it's made anything easier, and yet it is empowerment. And empowerment doesn't come free or easy, and we have to do a whole other side of work for the choices we have, to make them really matter, because it's standing on the shoulders of all these women who didn't have the same choices. So, it was all of that that I wanted to explore. And that has to do with the fact that I was always so close to someone who was so generationally removed from me.

KO: It sounds like you had a very special relationship with both of them. Thank you for sharing that with us. So, no spoilers here, but you have Bindu, who has seemingly always worked inside the home; Ali, who ends up divorced from her husband because he doesn't respect her career aspirations; and Cullie, who is sort of actively dismissing the idea of love in her current state in favor of her career. And The Vibrant Years is really layered with the impact of career expectations and relationship expectations that women face from society, from their own family, but also the expectations that they place on themselves. What do you hope listeners take away from this story in regards to the balance between love and career?

SD: You know, I actually really want that discussion to go away. I want that have-it-all thing to just be done with, you know? Because I don't see my husband struggle with it. I don't see my son struggle with it. I rarely have seen a man struggle with it. And yet that is the thing that is made so front and center in our lives. And yes, there is the whole thing where biologically we’re having children or whatever, but that's a matter of a four-hour labor or a 16-hour labor after which parenting should become pretty equivalent.

I think, for me, it's more about wanting, right? And we want things because we want an identity. We want to understand ourselves. Sure, it's putting food on the table and all of that, but really it is again about the fact that we now can. And for all three women their work is very deeply tied to their identity, which is an experience that comes from my heart, because what I do is me. There's very little division between what I do and who I am. And I think when I talk about my grandmother being a doctor, she was a doctor all the way to her soul, you know? And so many women like her probably had that and couldn't do it, right? Even today, so many women like me who love to write probably feel like they really can't do it, but that's much less, and that's a whole different piece of it.

I think that really it's about the fact that now there is no question of someone else holding it from you, or not so many physical or societal things getting in your way, and yet we get in our own way so much. That brings us back to conditioning, back to what we want. What makes us feel whole? I really want the conversation to shift to that, to what makes a woman feel whole. If having children is what makes you feel whole, then that's what makes you feel whole. If needing to write a book is what makes you feel like a complete person, then that's what makes you feel like a complete person. What is having it all? “All” is different for me, “all” is different for you. I think it's just a thing created to tell women over and over again that unless you have family and children, you have nothing. That's what they really mean by having it all. They don't mean actually having it all, they just mean, “Can you have the other things and be a mom and a wife and a daughter?” And so I think I just want that conversation to go away. And I'd really want the conversation to be about understanding yourself. And feeling like you're allowed to want whatever you want, and having the right to that, having the right to your own existence and identity.

KO: I feel like I want to break out into applause [laughs].

SD: [Laughs.] Thank you, or a dance, like a Bollywood film.

KO: That was great, thank you. I was just curious, did you have a favorite scene from the novel?

SD: Oh my gosh.

KO: Hard to pick.

SD: It is. It is really, really hard to pick, but I will tell you that there are, it's one of the best things that can happen as a writer is that you write something that makes you laugh out loud the 17th time that you read the scene. And there are some scenes in that book which, I don't know if others will find it funny, but they just crack me up. And some of it is just stupid potty humor, and it just makes me feel like I'm 12, and laugh like I'm 12.

And I think that there might be scenes that are unexpected. Little things, like when Ashish makes a roti for her. I don't know what it is about that scene. Something about that scene makes me feel just so many things that I can't even describe. The fact that somebody who has felt so internally pressured to take care of everyone, her identity has been so tied up with that, to just have the last person on Earth she would expect to take care of her, or thinks needs to take care of her in this way, takes care of her in this way. And I think just something about it puts my heart together. I think something about it, in a very intrinsic way to the story, puts Bindu in a place different from everything she's believed about her life. About men, about everything. The fact that her son makes her a roti, rolls it up the way she did for him when he was a child, and does it so automatically. Even as I'm talking about it now, it's such a simple, almost kind of muted, unimportant scene, but every single time I read it, something inside my heart just moves.

KO: I love that. That's beautiful. It was not necessarily what I was expecting you were going to say, but I think that's a very beautiful choice. You have three fantastic narrators on The Vibrant Years: Deepti Gupta, Soneela Nankani, and Anita Kalathara. You and Soneela are a pairing that everyone loves. But this is the first time that you've actually gotten to work with Deepti and Anita. What was the casting process like to select these three voices?

SD: I'll start with Bindu because she is a character I have not seen on paper too much. She was the person that was, for me, really, really important to get right. Of course, I was sent bios and sounds. And these women have great work they've already done and are really good voice artists. When Deepti reached out with these questions, where she was trying to get a visual of who this grandmother is like, and I think this is before she had read the book, and she was thinking South Asian actresses, and she's thinking Zohra Sehgal, who always plays these—I think she's in Bend It Like Beckham—she plays these North Indian, Punjabi, overtly sometimes bawdy, sometimes naughty...that grandmother stereotype.

"What is having it all? 'All' is different for me, 'all' is different for you. I think it's just a thing created to tell women over and over again that unless you have family and children, you have nothing. That's what they really mean by having it all."

And Bindu is absolutely not her, right? The sari-wearing, white-haired, kind of funny-without-meaning-to-be-funny grandmother, and Bindu is absolutely not that. And then we were trying to find who would be, for lack of a better term, a sexy grandmother who is so multifaceted and this kind of person who I think actresses would love to play, but haven't really had that much of a chance to play. We tried to find someone, and it was really hard to match, because all of the other mothers in South Asian cinema and literature were, as I said, those two things. They were either the bawdy grandma or then this very staid, graceful—you know, which is the kind of grandmother I have written in my Rajes series. You know, there's this font of grace and wisdom who, again, she is, but she's not. You know, that's not her.

So, we actually had to identify some Bollywood actresses who were in their sixties, not onscreen, but their social media presence. I was like, this is what we're looking at, how they are in real life, how they talk in their interviews. And that is a whole person who is getting the work on their faces, who's going to the gym every day, who is wearing really lovely clothes, and yet has all this wisdom and this depth and all of that. And so we had to go there with her. And I think Deepti was willing to do that work. It was really important for me to get the accents right. Deepti, of course, had to be someone who had lived in India until she was 40 and has only lived in this country for the past 25 years. The way she talks and who she is, is urbanized Indian, but Indian. And so, in terms of accent and in terms of attitude, I wanted that texture. And Deepti did a really great job with that.

Soneela, as you said, has done such a great job with all of my books. Every time I hear her narrate, she has so much emotion in her voice, which is my number-one thing when I'm writing, is that I want no layers between what I'm saying and what you're feeling, right? I want that emotionality to be there, and I want you to feel everything all at once. Like, if I were to identify what do I want for my readers, I want them to, in a safe space, be able to feel a huge range of emotions. If you don't come away from this book having laughed at least once and teared up at least once, it would make me very sad.

KO: It's impossible, don't worry [laughs].

SD: Thank you. And she does that. Soneela has both, you know? She's got the texture which goes all the way across that spectrum of being funny and light to being really emotional and plumbing those depths. Aly was an easy one for me to cast. And as a young person, Cullie isn't your traditional twentysomething, right? She's this old soul who is cynical and feels like she's done it all. And yet she has all these challenges, and I wanted her to go from a place of this, not darkness, but this seriousness to really—she's the person who really lightens up, who finds joy when she really doesn't think joy exists, and so somebody who has the youth but also has all that depth. I think Anita's done a really great job with that. And she does accents really well. I just love how she does the accents. And again, voice, you know? We were talking about the rhythm and the rhyme, how the book sounds. Even when I'm reading it in my head, these three women sound completely different. I think these three voice artists really get that, which was so amazing.

KO: Yeah, I agree. They did such a good job of highlighting the differences, too, between these women and their journeys and where they are in life. I think that can also impact the tone in your voice, right? What you've lived and what you haven't lived yet. They did a really beautiful job.

SD: Beautiful, yes.

KO: Now that The Vibrant Years is out in the world, what are you excited to explore next?

SD: I'm sure you hear this from all writers. Even though I am working on bringing Vibrant Years to readers, I have creatively been done with it for a good six months-plus, and very much deeply am entrenched in my next story. So, it was actually really fun this morning, getting ready for the interview. I went and read Vibrant Years again. It's really somewhere between all of those books still being very alive in your head and creatively you being in the throes of the next one, which is all to say that I'm very much in the throes of the next one. I think, actually, it might be different from this one. It is still three women, but it is the story of a friendship that breaks up 27 years ago over a botched surrogacy arrangement between best friends.

KO: Oh, wow.

SD: Those monsters are back to roost 27 years later. This experience of girlfriends and friendships are such an important part of being a woman for a lot of women. And often a girlfriend breakup is far more painful than even a romantic breakup. I wanted to dig into that a little bit, what that does to you and what it takes to stand back up and even how connected we get with our friends. And yet the romance or the spousal or the romantic relationship is considered more definitive, but really it's our friendships, I think, that are at least equal.

KO: Ooh, I can't wait. I'll be sitting over here waiting for that listen. Well, thank you so much for your time today. And listeners, you can get The Vibrant Years by Sonali Dev right now on Audible.