You don’t expect a novel about a heroin addict to be a hoot.
Problems, the debut novel by New York author Jade Sharma, is the story of Maya, a writer whose life is running away from her. She has a kind but heavy-drinking husband she is certain is about to leave her, she's having an affair with a disinterested older man, her drug habit is escalating and she's struggling with an eating disorder.
And things, as they say, are about to get worse.
Hailed as edgy, quirky and raw, Problems is somehow not misery lit. In Sharma's skilled hands, the quicksand of Maya's life is mordantly funny, and full of brilliant lines you'll want to text to your friends.
Sharma writes, “Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, ‘What? I’m not doing anything,’” and we all nod knowingly.
Speaking with Sharma, it becomes clear that while her life may be different to her narrator’s, her tone is not. She speaks slowly, with a New York drawl and the dark candour familiar from her writing. Sharma was compelled to write the type of book she didn’t see enough of in the world, about a character, “that was self-aware and smart as I am, making bad decisions. I think it’s a shame that there hasn’t been more three-dimensional representations of women. We’re 50 per cent of the population. There’s so much material there and all the women that I’ve known have been just as funny as the guys.”
There was also an impetus to understand the life of her best friend. “[She] has been addicted on and off for 18 years. She’s intelligent, she’s beautiful. She’s had really great jobs. She understands she’s addicted to something that’s destroying her life. That gap between understanding your situation and your issues and actually doing something about it, I think a lot of people live in that space.”
Porn use
In Problems, Sharma writes about what some have called "taboo" topics, like her narrator's porn use, and candid descriptions of personal grooming and masturbation. It was only in her MFA writing class that she became aware that this aspect of her work was shocking for some.
“I had written a scene where she masturbates and it wasn’t even graphic. I think she rubs herself on a blanket and falls asleep. Guys and girls both had an issue: it comes out of nowhere, what’s the point of it, is it supposed to be shocking? And I’m like, no. It’s just a boring day. It’s a woman in the afternoon and that’s what she does. She eats a yoghurt out of nowhere. What’s the difference?”
Her teacher told her “if it had been a guy, they would have laughed”.
There is no intention to shock, she simply finds it difficult to censor her thoughts. “I’ve no idea what’s going to resonate with people or if they’re going to read it and think, what a weirdo. It’s always the fear, y’know, the vulnerability.”
Nor did Sharma ever wish to glamorise her narrator’s drug use. “It shows the banality.”
The actual taboos in Problems are more likely to be a woman voicing sentiments about the boredom of marriage, or how "having a family is a popular way to waste your life". At one point, Maya wonders if having a child would give her a way to erase herself. "On my Facebook page, above my name, there would be his or her little face."
The whole novel takes place inside Maya’s head, a place of uncomfortable truth, which has raised the issue of Maya’s likeability. It’s a common complaint about female protagonists who spare us little and describe the truth of their lives head-on. Readers still struggle with female characters who won’t play nice.
‘Cynical and sarcastic’
This irritates Sharma. "I don't want to argue with the [New York] Times rave but the last line was 'Maya is as horrible, and as fully human, as men in literature have always been allowed to be'. I get that this is a character we're used to seeing as a white male, self-deprecating and cynical and sarcastic, and instead it's a young Indian-American woman. But I don't understand the 'horrible' part of it. She doesn't do things just to hurt people. She judges people but I feel like we all do."
Sharma admits that Maya was a dark character with whom to spend her days. “I was destroying her world, that was kind of the challenge; what if you take somebody and they’re doing okay, and then everything just keeps going wrong and they just make the worst decisions possible?”
Once Maya begins having sex for money, things have sunk to a dark place. “Over time you’ve done enough stuff that you didn’t really feel like doing, that eventually it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.” Her attitude is typically distant, almost objective, and asks no pity from the reader:
“There’s some liberation there too, for her,” Sharma says. “She isn’t living on the streets. I try to make sure that the stakes are never too high for her, or that nothing too bad would happen to her. That’s not the book I wanted to write. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with what she’s doing and it could be exciting to meet different types of men and look at their world. I did research on Craigslist and I was so surprised at how different the men were.”
One thing Sharma was determined to avoid was a happy ending centred on a man. "If I had any agenda, that was the only one. When I read Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, I was so affected by it. I was like, oh my God there's a woman who thinks like me, she's funny and smart and she likes men, but she's intelligent. She leaves her boring husband and she discovers herself and has sexually liberating experiences, but then at the end she goes back to her husband! I'm like, are you kidding me? I wanted to make sure a boy did not save the day."
Sharma is Indian-American, and so is her narrator, but she initially considered making Maya white. “I didn’t want the book to be coloured through the lens of identity politics. I was really afraid it would be. You’re so lucky if you create a white character and you’re white because you have a blank slate, a white person can be anything and it’s okay.”
She has been impressed by how little has been made of it.
Real life overlap
As with the New Yorker story, Cat Person, there is the danger that people will read this type of work as nonfiction. This seems to occur more often with women's writing, and with Problems, there is some overlap with the author's life – the narrator is also Indian-American, a writer, a New Yorker. "It's very condescending," Sharma says. "It's like, how could she dream that up? She must have just written what was around her. It's so misogynistic." But she appreciates it is a small compliment that her work rings true.
“When I thought no one would read it, it was kind of comforting. It’s like, who’s going to read this so who cares? But when it starts getting bigger, I was like, everyone’s gonna think this is my life. But you just have to deal with it.”
She has used elements of her life, and told her friends that she was using their experiences. “I think the only person that was worried about it was my boyfriend at the time. He edited some of it and he would say, you just write about the bad stuff, you don’t write about any of the good things. I said, well nobody cares about reading about a nice couple having a nice time. It’s not very interesting to anyone.”
At one point in the novel, the narrator has a conversation with her best friend, Elizabeth, also an addict, who tells Maya she is lucky she is a writer. “You have a place where you can put everything. You can make something out of all the ugliness.” Sharma feels this also, the catharsis of life becoming material for art. “You study and look, you get to have a lens, whereas other people, that’s just their life, they have to carry it.”
Living with bipolar disorder herself, Sharma has often felt “like life is meaningless but that’s why I feel humour is so important for me. It’s a kind of light. You can take all the ugliness and suffering in life and make something that’s kind of funny and at least you did something with it.”
Depression and art
She used to worry about taking medication for her illness but any idea that the depressed self is the artistic self holds no weight for her. “When I was a teenager, I was very against medication. I felt there’s something important to be gained from suffering; listening to Leonard Cohen alone in your room crying is somehow useful. As I grew up, I realised there’s no real wisdom or meaning in it.”
Sharma’s family have never approved of her writing career, concerned that the lack of structure is not good for her. Rave reviews have changed little there. “Nobody really talks about it.”
Sheer competitiveness, however, kept her on track. In her writing class, she was determined to be top dog. “A lot of it was just jealousy because a lot of the students there came from very supportive families. This one girl was like, I used to read stories at the dinner table and everyone would applaud. I was just like, I want to kill these people. I simultaneously wanted to be in their position and also wanted to kill them. I was like, I’m going to write something that you can’t criticise, something that’s so good you have to validate it.”
Despite this bloody-mindedness, Sharma was shocked when the good reviews rolled in. “I remember the day before they were publishing it, I was talking to a friend of mine and I said, what if no one reviews it. Does a book come out and no one notices? There are very talented people who are flipping burgers. There isn’t really a correlation between success and talent.”
Sharma has a novella, One Million Blows, coming out later this year and is working on a second novel. "I think Tom Waits said when you're tapping on the shoulder of the world and the world turns around, make sure you have something to say. I don't want to waste this opportunity. That was one of the surreal things after I saw the New York Times piece. First, it's surreal and you're elated, and then it's sort of, oh f**k, I've been noticed."
Problems by Jade Sharma is published in Britain and Ireland by Tramp Press
