All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Shondaland spoke with Mathews about the coming-of-age genre, friendship, sex writing, and how her mutual aid organizing experience informs her writing. She was instrumental in creating the grassroots organization Bed-Stuy Strong, which raised $1.2 million to help 28,000 Brooklynites during the pandemic. Mathews, whose work was selected in The Best American Short Stories 2020, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The book is funny, poignant, and hits every nail on the head when it comes to dialogue and the nuances for friendship, work, sex, healing, and ultimately growing up. But through it all, she builds a chosen family who show up for one another in their flawed and perfectly human ways. For the lucky, this could be preceded by a period of freedom, the latitude of youth.” Over the course of her 20s, Sneha navigates all the changes this particular period of time brings, from her relationship with her parents to working through past trauma, understanding her role in corporate America, and economic (in)security.Īnd as early-20s-somethings are wont to do, Sneha explores dating and all the messiness it entails - and ends up in a dysfunctional relationship with her girlfriend. True adulthood, she explains, signifies “a bowing down before the inevitable. Early in Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut novel, All This Could Be Different, the book’s narrator, Sneha - a queer Indian immigrant fresh out of college in the 2010s, living in Milwaukee and working her first corporate job - muses on what it means to be an adult.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews