Love Marriage

From the author: “This book grew out of two different stories that I was playing around with. One was about Harriet: a colourful north London, liberal, feminist type—and I had written this memoir about her lovers, male and female. The other was about Yasmin, junior doctor, Indian heritage, born and brought up in London. I wasn’t sure that I was going to end up writing either of them [as a novel]. Then I had a lightbulb idea…what if I put them together?”

“As soon as I thought of that, I knew it was a novel that I had to write, and it would be a lot of fun. And as soon as I had my first sentence, which is: “In the Ghorami household, sex was never mentioned”, I was off and running—because really, the narrative engine of this book is sex in one way or another. There are a lot of secrets and lies in the book. And again, virtually all of them are related to sex. There’s infidelity, revenge, sex addiction, covert incest—which is not physical, but it has a sexual undercurrent— plus questions of sexual identity, sexual violence, and so on. And, of course, all of these things can lead to secrecy, or covering up, not voicing your own truth. Or being in conflict with others, or being in conflict internally. For me, there’s often a gap for the characters and the families, between the surface and the reality—what lies above and what lies below. And that leads to a lot of conflicts, but it’s actually in facing those rather difficult truths, which they do, that they get beyond the difficulties and find an idea of who they actually are, who they want to be and how they want to be in this world. I won’t reveal any endings. But I do think Love Marriage has an optimistic ending. I do think it’s a book that, although it tackles some very difficult subjects, is a book that is hopeful and optimistic, fundamentally.”