Berkeley Talks: ‘Wave’ memoirist on writing about unimaginable loss

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

[Music fades out]

Ramona Naddaff: Hello everyone. Welcome. Thank you for coming. My name is Ramona Naddaff and I’m a professor in the rhetoric department and director of the Art of Writing Program at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. And I’m just going to say the Art of Writing hasn’t hosted its annual lecture since 2019, so it’s a tremendous pleasure today to recommence our annual lecture series with the economist and author, Sonali Deraniyagala. She has taken time to travel and to speak with us today about the process and art of writing of her 2013 bestselling, award-winning Wave.

So since we haven’t had a lecture for a really long time, forgive me. While I thank many people, many people are to thank for making these lectures possible. Present and past deans of the Arts and Humanities, present and past directors, some of whom are here today, present of the directors of the Townsend Center for the Humanities and present and past teams of the Art of Writing and of the Townsend Center. And I want to thank the many faculty, graduate and undergraduate students from a wide range of campus departments who, since 2016, have contributed to and helped shape the program. And really the Art of Writing is a collaborative effort.

And I have one more thanks. I need to thank the Friends of Art of Writing, many of whom are themselves writers and alumni of Berkeley. Today, two such friends are present. Matt and Margaret Jacobson. The Jacobsons have generously established the Professor Michael Rogin Art of Writing Endowment, and Professor Banfield and Michael Rogin’s daughter are here today. And that endowment has made this lecture series possible. Inspired by the pedagogical passions of his father, political science professor Norman Jacobson, and by his long time colleague, Michael Rogin, Matt will now speak to us about how he has united father, colleague, friend and Art of Writing. Thank you, Matt.

Matt Jacobson: So on my way over here, I just realized that it’s been 49 years since my last literature class at Cal, so don’t be so tough on me. Although I did grow up in an academic home, so I was graded every day.

So I’m here to provide a little background on how my wife Margaret and I became passionate supporters of the Doreen Townsend Center for the Humanities and its wonderful Art of Writing program. The story really began when my father joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley Political Science Department in 1951. He continued to teach on campus until his death in 2007. During his career, he was an unusual breed of educator focusing on the humanities side of the social science field that he was in. He was multidisciplinary and did not let academic boundaries define him. He inspired and entertained generations of students with his lectures, which were really essays that he would write in longhand on yellow legal paper. Oddly, I heard at a Townsend Center event yesterday that using an essay to deliver a lecture is not recommended. I guess my dad didn’t get the memo.

After he died, my family was introduced to the Townsend Center as a place on campus where his legacy and passion as a teacher could be passed down to future generations of students. Paul Alpers, the founding director of the Townsend Center and the late husband of Chancellor Carol Christ. In describing the center’s benefactor, Doreen Townsend, wrote that she was “prepared to discover that the faculty, the students, and the center were doing some unusual, and on occasion, incomprehensible thing.” My dad would’ve fit right in.

So prior to the COVID lockdown, Margaret and I had the pleasure of being introduced to an unusual program at the Townsend Center, the Art of Writing. It is designed to help students learn how to take their written voices to a higher level. We attended an event like this one and we were impressed by the elegance of the program and the passion of those involved, both the instructors and the student.

A few years later, then Arts and Humanities Dean Anthony Cascardi, a former director of the Townsend Center himself, asked if we would help with funding for the program. We jumped at the chance. But there was one catch. We wound up with program naming rights.

In a bit of a panic, I rifled through my mental Rolodex until I reached the Rs, which is where I found Michael Rogin. Mike was my father’s colleague in poli sci and a close friend. He was a beloved lecturer, inspirational teacher and an accomplished writer. He, too, worked outside traditional norms of academia by following his own humanist and multidisciplinary path. It is our hope that everyone who becomes aware of the Art of Writing program has the curiosity to learn about him and find something inspirational to work. The Townsend Center and the Art of Writing Program are unusual gems in the UC Berkeley community, hopefully though, not too incomprehensible. We are blessed to have them here. And please sit back and enjoy one of the benefits. Thank you.

Ramona Naddaff: I know this is a little unusual, but haven’t been here since 2019. So I want to briefly introduce our guest today about whom we’re going to learn much more during our conversation today.

Sonali Deraniyagala is an economist by training. Her research focuses on economic development including post-disaster recovery and extreme climate change. And she is, as many of you already know, the author of the memoir Wave, which recounts her experiences of catastrophic loss of family and friends during the 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami. Hailed as a “quiet memoir of torturous loss,” Joan Didion, herself a memoirist of extraordinary talent, understatement, called it an amazing, beautiful book. Sonali will today speak to us about the very act and art of writing Wave. My students reminded me last week that grief and grieving are messy. They voiced their amazement at how exquisitely composed and precise with Sonali’s language in describing the state.

So I’m going to ask a few questions and then my Rhetoric 121 students, who have been working hard on their questions, will then continue the interview with their very thoughtful and exciting comments. Allow me to welcome Sonali to the stage.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Well, thank you so much for having me, Ramona, for inviting me, and to the Art of Writing program for hosting me. Thank you. My pleasure to be here entirely.

Ramona Naddaff: Thank you. So before we discuss your art of writing Wave, I want to talk to you about your other life, as it were. You’re an economist, you’ve written a bestselling memoir, which has been praised for its exquisite style and narration. So I’m wondering how has your style of writing and thinking as an economist changed since Wave? And conversely, how was your identity as an economist influencing your style? I know that there’s a younger generation of social scientists and STEM students in the audience. I know one, in fact, very well, would be keen to know why and how they should care about their writing style and communication skills?

Sonali Deraniyagala: I’ll take your middle question first, how was Wave influenced by me being an economist? I don’t know if it was, to be honest, firstly. I’m not sure if writing a memoir … I mean economics? One thing I got from economics is precision, I would say. But here I was writing a memoir about the most imprecise thing you can ever imagine. So it was the antithesis of precision.

The reason I wrote, if I go back a little, I mean there’s many reasons I wrote. Firstly, I’m an accidental writer, so I never intended to write a book. And I was writing essentially for myself. I was writing to make sense of, firstly, what had happened. It was beyond my … I couldn’t grasp it. So I had to firstly put down very basic things like what happened and what happened to me when I was in the water and what did I remember.

And it was really strange things, like being taken by the water and seeing a flock of birds flying overhead and being so surreal that I identified what kind of birds they were. So that kind of bizarre observation I wrote to put that down just for myself so that I thought maybe one day. And all of this time I was also ambivalent about, am I going to stay alive? I mean, I was determined almost not to stay alive. So I was writing in this kind of … So that was the beginning of writing.

Later on, I think this changed as time went on over the years. So I took about seven, eight years to write it. And I wrote it also in real time as I went along, as to how I was, what I was experiencing, processing and so on. And when I began after some point and also loss of the scale, again, one can’t write easily or put into sentences or find words for, but when I began to craft it, after a point, again, it was essentially for myself, but I began to write what turned out to be chapters, but they were not meant to be chapters, but pieces that I would craft and I would try and find the best way to express it, to find my voice as it were. And so that may be my thinking as an economist came in there, the precision with which to find the best word to talk about.

Ramona Naddaff: Is that what you mean when you say you were trying to find your voice? I’m interested in how you understand that.

Sonali Deraniyagala: That’s a very instinctive thing, isn’t it? A voice when you write, I think it’s totally instinctive. I know when it sounds wrong then you know when it sounds right. I’m not a trained, I haven’t done any courses in writing or I’m not trained as a writer in any way as many people are, but I don’t even think that matters really.

So you know when it sounds right, but you don’t get to that point very easily. It takes a lot of work to get to the point where it sounds right. So for students who are studying writing, I think A, they are blessed to be trained in it, but secondly, it’s how do you hit that note. And you take all the falsity out of your voice. I think that’s when it sounds right. You take the pretension out and then it sounds …

And it should be as clear as possible. I mean, the other thing is clarity. I think Vivian Gornick, who I’ve kind of read a lot now since I wrote my memoir, and not only is she a brilliant memoirist, she writes about writing so well, and she says, “It’s not what has happened to the writer that matters. It’s how the writer figures out what has happened to them, what they make of it.” And I think it’s what they make of it and that’s a real challenge — how do you make something of? And I did most of it subconsciously. I didn’t set how to do it, but it had its own dynamic.

Ramona Naddaff: And maybe you can talk a little bit more about why people in other disciplines should think about their style of writing. And I agree with you, voice comes intuitively, but there must have been things you were reading or listening to that somehow formed your intuition about … I mean, there must have been an education that happened through your reading practices?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Sure. I mean, at the time I was writing, I was mainly reading fiction and poetry. I wasn’t that much of a nonfiction reader. And I certainly hadn’t read memoir and I wasn’t really even interested in reading memoir. So fiction and poetry as opposed to … And I read a lot of politics and economics because I’m an economist, but in terms of material or the way I learned to write, I had to teach myself to write, and I was aware of it. And primarily I think through reading a lot of fiction and contemporary fiction, which now I don’t read that much, but contemporary fiction and a lot of poetry and some nonfiction, but mainly … So it was an education. Yeah, I had to learn and educate myself.

But I think you find any writer that writes lucidly for students, if you’re an engineering student, you should read, I say Natalia Ginzburg, Italian writer who was writing in the 1950s. And no one can write a lucid sentence that she can. So I mean, I think if you want to write an engineering manual, read Natalia Ginzburg and that would help you. So I think there is a lot of cross-fertilization and where you train your mind. Or if you want to be a poet, study Matt Cudby, that could work. So it depends where you can … You can draw your inspiration from or your training from anywhere in a way, as long as it’s within.

Ramona Naddaff: So I know you told me you’ve been teaching on extreme climate change, and that’s obviously a very different way of thinking about the tsunami. If you had to write about what you’re teaching, do you think you would still … would you keep your voice the more so-called objective voice that say you used when you would be writing reports? Or would you try to somehow put in your lyrical literary voice?

Sonali Deraniyagala: No, I don’t at all put in a …

Ramona Naddaff: No, you don’t?

Sonali Deraniyagala: No. I mean, I teach a course called Extreme Climate or Disasters and Economic Development, and I teach it jointly with an earth scientist, with a seismologist. So he does the physics of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, droughts and all of that, and climate science. And I do the post-effects, the social, political effects of it. Of course, when you teach, and even in economics, I mean I always say an economic model is also a story. And there’s a narrative to an economic model. So in that way I try to make it as interesting as possible because we all know when we’re teaching, you want to bring it alive for students.

So I do try to always start my class with this example of so-called witch killings in Tanzania, which is a killing of elderly women by family members, which happened in the early 2000s in Tanzania. And the rate of witch killings really went up in the early 2000s, I’ll tell you very quickly, compared to the other murder rates, regular murder rates.

So the question is, why was this? Was this purely a patriarchal kind of violence or was there something else going on? And what some sociologists found out is that, really, it had to do with extreme weather, too little rain caused a scarcity of food, which led to murder of elderly women within the family. So I always say witch killings and my students, look, “What’s that going to do with anything?” And then of course when you explain, then you set the tone in a way for, how do we break open these phenomena and look at it through a more analytical lens. So that’s an extreme case.

Ramona Naddaff: Well, like you said, you tell them a story.

Sonali Deraniyagala: You tell them a story.

Ramona Naddaff: You tell them a story.

Ramona Naddaff: Which you did with Wave, and I’ll change now in that direction. So it’s been 20 years since the tsunami in Sri Lanka, and it’s been more than 10 years since you published Wave. And I know you’ve told the story many times about how you came to write Wave, and the students will be asking you more about that.

But I want to ask you a little bit of a different question. In an interview, you once said that there was a passage that neither you or anyone else edited or revised, which is an amazing feat as far as I can tell. So was that an act of magical inspiration? Was there something … Because the passage, if I understood correctly, is when you first go back to your home in London in 2008, and it had taken you a while to get back there, and you enter into the house and you start seeing everything was the same as it had been. And I think that’s the passage you … that chapter that you went home to New York and you just wrote it?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yes. Well, so I didn’t go back to our family home for four years. I was in Sri Lanka when it happened, and eventually I found my way to New York and I would. Even when I went to England, I wouldn’t visit the house. I hardly went to London, I’d stay with people elsewhere and so on. So then suddenly, four years later I said, “OK, I’m going to go back,” and I did. And I went and I spent two days, I didn’t stay in the house, I think, and I came back and I wrote my experience of being there. It was like four pages or something. And when I say I didn’t change it, I mean I write very slowly and I write changing and editing a lot as I go along. So maybe I took a month to write it, maybe I took two or three weeks to write it. It’s not like I sat down and just wrote it.

I chiseled it. I do chisel, I write it very slowly. I get it right. So once I did that and I was OK with it eventually, and then maybe I wrote it sometime in 2008 and it didn’t become a book until 2012, I hadn’t touched it and my editors didn’t touch it either. So in that way it was untouched. But I do myself editing a lot, so I’m a terrible writer. I mean, it takes a long time to get good sentences down or that’s good enough for me at least.

Ramona Naddaff: I’m wondering, because we often use the dictum to our students that good writing is rewriting, and I’d like you to talk to us a little bit more in detail about your revision process and also if there’s a passage in Wave that you wish you could rewrite?

Sonali Deraniyagala: The revision process is quite hard. I mean, that is where intuition,  think … two things when you’re writing, even memoir … A memoir is not really about what happened, what happened, what happened, right? It’s got to have some kind of, I think, analytical thread running through it. So each piece, you’re trying to arrive at something or explore something or explode something for yourself. You’re kind of digging around. And I often can begin with the last sentence or the first sentence that comes to me is like a hook to hang it in. And then you digress and you come back.

So for me at least it’s going somewhere, it’s got some kind of end. So that’s one, the revision process. So that takes a lot of time. And then at the editing stage of my book, Sonny Mehta at Knopf edited Wave.

Ramona Naddaff: Will you tell the audience a little bit about? Because, well, I don’t know, I guess he didn’t die until 20 …

Sonali Deraniyagala: No, he just died two years ago.

Ramona Naddaff: So he had many authors after you?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yes, he was a great, great editor and he was my primary editor at Knopf, and I had a Canadian editor, too, so the two of them. And so the editing process, by the time I gave it to them, I’d self edited so much that it was quite light. They changed a few words here and there, there was no big chapter change or nothing major at all. So it was for me, entirely pleasurable. I called it The Wave and he took the The out and I was like, “Honey, I think that sounds better,” and he just completely ignored me. So that was …

Ramona Naddaff: Do you remember any other of the editorial?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Very light things. And then my Canadian editor, she was great, too. She asked for stuff I’d written that I had taken out myself because when I told her that I … because it was so pared down when I gave it to them and she added little bits in. So some of my discards came back in as well. Editing was great fun because, for me anyway, it was quite a nice process.

Ramona Naddaff: And you also worked with another writer, right, when you were writing the …

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yeah, well, I was very lucky because literally I didn’t know a single writer. I’m an economist, so I didn’t know anybody who wrote books or even a fiction writer. I had a very small group of friends and my therapist in New York, Mark Epstein, he was my primary reader always. It’s he who told me, “You should write.” And I’m like, “Are you nuts? I’m not going to write.” But he cajoled me gradually into writing. So a lot of the chapters came out of discussions. We’d work on something or we’d talk about. It wasn’t even work, it was really talking about this feeling of shame, for instance, with and why not guilt, why shame? And talking about that a lot. And then I’d write something.

I read somewhere that you always write for one person, and he was probably the primary ear I wrote. And I had a group of three friends say, anthropologists, they were just my friends, they were not writers, and they read. So each thing I’d write and then they would read it and we would move on from there.

And so after many years, the writer, Michael Ondaatje, the Canadian Sri Lankan writer, I’d met him at dinner at my friend’s house in New York, and we got on really well. But that was that, and I didn’t dare tell him that I was writing. And then later my friend said, “Oh, you’ve got to send this to Michael.” I just asked him, “Oh dear, will Michael remember me kind of email.” And I said, “I’ve been writing, would you …” And he said, “Oh, send me 30 pages,” which I did. And then he was in the middle of the book and he said, “I’ll definitely get to it.” And finally he did and he said, “Have you got any more?” So I sent him everything I had. I said, “I’ve got the whole thing.”

And he was so great. He told me, “Come to Toronto tomorrow,” kind of thing. So I went a few days later and he sat with me and he went through this manuscript. I didn’t even know it was called a manuscript then. So we went through it and he gave me the most important note, I think one note I took away was that don’t repeat the same emotion twice and always be ahead of the reader, and he took out a few swear words. And he said, I still remember, he said, “Yeah.” And so I took that away with me and I combed it again and looked at it and looked at it maybe six months later and he said, “Send it back.” And when I sent it back, he said, “There’s nothing more.” And he gave me his agent and then that was …

Ramona Naddaff: So I’m curious, did you repeat certain emotions in the first draft?

Sonali Deraniyagala: I guess I did, right?

Ramona Naddaff: Do you remember which ones they were, other than swearing?

Sonali Deraniyagala: I can’t. He said too many fucks is in. So I took that out. I remember that, he was …

Ramona Naddaff: So the anger was repeated over and over again?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yeah, a lot, but I took … And to be ahead of the reader.

Ramona Naddaff: What does that mean exactly to be ahead of the reader?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Because emotion, even grief is many faceted, right? There’s grief and there’s grief, and there’s different aspects to it. So don’t repeat boring old grief, go to a newer one and another one and another angle to it. And it becomes interesting even for you, if not, you’re saying the same thing, so you kind of deeper or sideways or whichever way you go. So I think, yeah. And just here and there we took it out. Not much, but that was a very good note.

He told me this thing, and that’s good for students of writing as well. And I’ve read this book, it’s called The Conversations, where it’s between Michael Ondaatje and Walter Murch, who’s a film editor. He did all the great films. And Walter Murch said that they filmed, they want … I don’t know which movie it was in, but the director wanted blue light, so they filmed the whole scene with blue light and it just didn’t work. And then after a point he said, the editor said take out the blue light and you take out the blue light and somehow the blue light is still there because somehow it’s got infused into the situation. So that even, when it comes to writing, you can take something out, you can take a lot out and whatever you need to say is still there.

Ramona Naddaff: And you were not fearful cutting all the time things out? It didn’t feel like you were …

Sonali Deraniyagala: No, no.

Ramona Naddaff: No?

Sonali Deraniyagala: No, no.

Ramona Naddaff: Well I’m going to switch the topic very dramatically and then open it up to my students. So I feel like it’s inevitable today to talk to you about AI and writing and algorithmic writing and your thoughts about it, about authorship, about human-centric authorship, AI authorship, collaborative authorship.

Vauhini Vara’s 2021 publication of “Ghosts” in the Believer specifically addresses this issue of collaborative authorship. She had been unable to write about the death of her sister and she turned to ChatGPT to help her write the story. And her need of AI was to help her voice her grief. I’m curious what thoughts you might have about it, because I know you struggled so fiercely one-on-one with your grief that to bring another element in, and I just want to read you how she begins her story. “I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. AI matched my canned language, cliches abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, AI seemed to be doing the same.”

Sonali Deraniyagala: I hate that. I mean really, I just could not. Yikes. No.

Ramona Naddaff: Tell us more. Because we are all, as professors and writers, this AI, ChatGPT has entered into our lives.

Sonali Deraniyagala: You can use a human, right? You can ask somebody, too. We all know someone that we can talk to. I don’t know in terms of creative writing or I mean an essay on how do hurricanes affect GDP growth in Puerto Rico between 1990 and 1997, say? You could maybe ask AI to get some information on that.

But if you are writing anything more meaningful or many creative, nonfiction, poetry … I don’t know how, I am too old maybe, but I’d hate the thought of going to AI. But we go to the internet, of course, we read poetry, we read other things, too, and there’s a lot out there that we don’t need to. What do we do when you want to figure out an emotion? We can go read Joan Didion or we can read poetry or we can read any, there’s lots of fantastic, we can find it. We can read Shakespeare. There is material there, but I personally wouldn’t know how to access AI to do that.

Ramona Naddaff: And you would have no desire is what you’re saying?

Sonali Deraniyagala: I would have absolutely no desire to, no, because I would need a human interaction or other kind of books, literatures journals, whatever. But that’s just me. And maybe in 20 …

Ramona Naddaff: Maybe, well, we’re interested in you today. We’re interesting in your …

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yeah, yeah. So I couldn’t, I mean, I can’t think of anything worse. I mean, I hate them. I can’t. And less personal and I don’t know, it’s kind of, I don’t want to be judgmental, but almost dishonest, isn’t it? If you’re writing about yourself.

Ramona Naddaff: Well, we’re going to be talking next week about authenticity and AI. So when you say it’s dishonest …

Sonali Deraniyagala: No, no, no.

Ramona Naddaff: You don’t have to come to class. When you say it’s dishonest, what exactly …

Sonali Deraniyagala: No, I mean of lacking authenticity somewhere, but maybe people know to use it in better ways than … I don’t know much about it. So maybe. But how do you …

Ramona Naddaff: Well, maybe some of the students will talk to you about their experience.

Sonali Deraniyagala: I mean, certain things you can use it for, I guess, if you’re writing an essay on something pretty technical to start you off. You need two sentences, but then you surely should think of those two sentences yourself. I mean it’s not that difficult too. If you are at Berkeley or Columbia, that you can do. So why do you need … So I don’t know, it’s all … But I’m a luddite maybe on this.

Ramona Naddaff: Well, I won’t have you keep talking about it. I’ll have you talk about Wave. I know you keep telling us you wrote this, Wave, to your therapist, to yourself. You dedicated the book to your children’s best friends to tell them the story. I’m sure you had in mind people who have gone through these type of catastrophes also that you wanted to reach out to them in a way. You didn’t know them. It was an unknown audience.

But I recently heard an interview, there’s a new memoir being written that’s going to come out by a Palestinian who’s in prison for, he’s been accused of murder. And the opening of the book is all about the wall. And so the interviewer, who’s a Lacanian psychoanalyst, which is why she asked this question, was, “Are you speaking to the wall as the symbolic other that is going to send back a message to you?” I’m not going to ask that question. And actually, I don’t even know what the symbolic other is, was or could be.

But I do want to know about how you were addressing, were you addressing Wave? I kept looking and I saw there was no definite or indefinite article. Did it go from A Wave to The Wave to Wave? I mean, were you talking to the wave also?

Sonali Deraniyagala: No.

Ramona Naddaff: Never?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Never. No, no, not at all. I mean, Wave was the Wave was the Wave. What mattered was the loss. It could have been a tree. It just happened to be the wave. And that’s the way I looked at it anyway. I wasn’t that interested in how it happened. It was more this bizarre, I mean otherworldly situation where I had a life, I didn’t have a life and it took 10 minutes between the two.

So it was, that I was trying to figure out, and I think the whole book Wave was trying to. Everything you know vanishes in an instant, literally in an instant with no warning. It’s not like … even an accident. You know what an accident is? I’d never heard the word tsunami before. And Sri Lanka’s not been a coastline that had … it’s not an earthquake, we are not on any fault lines. We never had tsunamis in the known history of Sri Lanka.

So I experienced something that I didn’t have words for. I didn’t know what was happening when it was happening, which is why I was sure I was dreaming. I was really, when I was in that wave, I was 100% sure I was dreaming because what was this? So no, I wasn’t addressing it to a wave or the wave. It didn’t really matter how. Once it had happened, the how didn’t matter to me at all. It was like, now what do I do? And that was what mattered.

Ramona Naddaff: So now the editor in me is really curious, did you choose your title?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Like I said, I sent it to him with The Wave and he took out and Sonny took out the word “The.”

Ramona Naddaff: Oh. OK. I missed it. Ah, I see. OK, yes, I see now. Excuse me.

Sonali Deraniyagala: But it was very hard to title. I mean, we did try and think of other things, but we just left it in that way. Yeah.

Ramona Naddaff: So I’m going to turn it over now to Rhetoric 121. Most of them are sitting over there. And our first, Dimitri is going to open with a question. Dmitri, could you stand up? And I think I’m going to bring you the mic for now. Thank you very much.

Audience 1: Hi.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Hi, Dimitri.

Audience 1: Thank you first of all for coming out today for this amazing discussion. We noticed while reading that you alternate between past and present tenses quite frequently, you often break the chronology throughout the narration, invoking visions from before the wave and blending moments in time. So we were curious about, was this alternating between tenses and moments or memories, a decision you made while you were writing the book, or did it come about while you were revising or working with your editor?

Sonali Deraniyagala: That’s a lovely question. Thank you. That’s just the way I wrote it. For sure, it didn’t come out of revisions. And I guess it was the mind that’s speaking to myself so that it’s, at any point in time, we are always shifting between, if you follow your thought, your thoughts always shift between going back and now back and now. And I think I was trying to be true to that. And certainly in certain chapters, in certain places, we’re here now, but then you’re talking about something and he did that and I’m doing this.

So it was some way of … Because I also had to figure out suddenly why did my present become my past? So as far as I was concerned, it was almost still my present. And it had suddenly had to become, it was enforced to become, forcibly became a past. So I think maybe subliminally, that’s probably why as well, I don’t know. But now that you ask me and I’m thinking about it could be that, that’s why and I just left it. It felt right. Basically a lot of it is what I felt was OK and it felt right and I left it.

Audience 1: Thank you.

Ramona Naddaff: Do you want to hand the mic to Amber?

Audience 2: Hi.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Hi.

Audience 2: When you encountered the sheet of laminated paper on the beach, it prompted a question about memory and how you frame it as fearful to remember, but also fearful to forget. A few sentences capture your shift in the mindset. “After finding that page, I was no longer afraid of chancing upon our belongings amid this rubble. Now I am wanted to discover more.” Living, remembering and writing about a specific memory is complicated to depict. How did your memory of the specific experience transform in each instance?

Sonali Deraniyagala: How did my memory transform? See, when I wrote, that was an incident where I went back to where it happened and I went with my father-in-law. And my father-in-law said, “I want to stand here under a tree for a moment.” And he went and stood under a tree. And when I went back to him, he said, oh, something fluttered by his foot under the tree. And he looked it up and it was a laminated sheet of paper from a report and he said, “Is this something of Steve’s?” My husband’s, and I looked at it, and he was an econometrician, and it was. So this was in the midst of all the devastations, about six months later, there’d been a monsoon. The rubble had been moved and all of that, and all of that had happened. So I then described that in the book.

And so when I was writing that, all I can say now is I was just trying to be true to what happened and true to how exactly it happened and what I felt at the time. So yes, so with huge, colossal trauma like this, you’re terrified of remembering. I think most people are. You don’t want to remember the good. The bad is not so bad to remember, the wave itself is not so … I’m not traumatized by water or anything like that, the ocean or anything, but I didn’t find any of that traumatic or I was not triggered or any of this.

But what triggered you was good things like a tennis ball or a cricket bat or a nice thing, that would be joy would be more traumatic. So this thing of trying to cut off, trying to shut down memory and then memory comes bursting in with objects like this. So that was what I was trying to capture. Because I think lots of people go through that as well when you’re trying to shut out reality. And then of course it comes bounding in and yeah.

Audience 2: Thank you.

Audience 3: Thank you so much for your time.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Thanks, Anish.

Audience 3: In class, we’ve been discussing the use of memoirs as tools to examine our own inner lives and how an author constructs a character while reflecting and writing about memories. Over the years since Wave‘s publication, how has your relationship to the person you portrayed in Wave changed …

Sonali Deraniyagala: That’s a good question.

Audience 3: … as your life has progressed and evolved? Does the memoir serve to bring you closer to the person you were at that time? Or do you feel a distance from them?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Good question. Very good. I haven’t thought about that actually. Yeah, it’s very good.

Ramona Naddaff: I’m glad to hear that.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yeah. Well, like a lot of writers, I mean a lot of writers don’t read the book they wrote ever again. And I haven’t looked at it for 10 years. I don’t know what’s in there.

Ramona Naddaff: I think a lot of professors feel the same way.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yeah, right? So I think John Banville, the novelist, I read an interview with him where he says, whenever a book comes out, he wants to go into every bookstore and erase the entire book. That’s his urge is, “Oh, my God, I wish I can go in at night and take away all the words and then write it again.” So it is that you don’t want to look at what you wrote again. And with memoir, it’s even more tricky, right? If there was a person there and is that the same person and are you embarrassed? And there’s so many.

But I think you’ve just got to let the book be and let that person be and that was that person and it can’t be that different from who I am now either. But it is … yeah, I think there’s some kind of equilibrium there. You have to allow that book to be and then you’re going to change as well. There is a problem with, I think now when I write and try to write memoir and if I write over time and I look at something I wrote two years ago, I go eeks, because you feel so different even from two years ago. So that is a real problem. And sometimes you got to just hold tight and just go with it and just keep writing. Yeah.

Ramona Naddaff: Ashlyn.

Audience 4: Thank you. So you mentioned writing Wave at the urging of your therapist, but we’re interested in learning more about when in your writing process you considered publishing your book. You write a little bit about this in your memoir, and we wanted to learn more. And then as a follow-up, since publishing Wave, have any reactions surprised you? Have any reviews captured your intentions and emotions better than others? And if so, how?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Firstly, when it became a book, it became a book only a year before it was published. So I had this collection of materials and I kind of almost made new chapters, so it was a book. And then I got an agent and a publisher very quickly. So I was very lucky. I mean, the first publisher, Knopf, took it became a book. So it took, it was bought in August, say, it came out in March, I think, the next year. So it became a book quite … from me, not even thinking it’ll be a book to becoming a book.

So that was … Yeah, I mean, I for one was very surprised at the positive response to it because I was not a writer and I didn’t feel that I was a writer or I didn’t know how to be a writer. So it was all new to me. And no, I mean I think in some reviews you’re quite surprised that they get it better than you do. They say, “Wow, really?” Yeah, no, no. So it was a very positive experience on the whole.

Audience 4: Thank you.

Ramona Naddaff: Well, I think we have a little time for one or two questions from the audience before we have to say goodbye.

Audience 4: I can bring this one over.

Ramona Naddaff: Thank you, Ashlyn.

Audience 5: Hearing about your … Excuse me, sorry.

Sonali Deraniyagala: That’s all right.

Audience 5: Hearing about your story is very interesting to me, especially how you were trained to be an economist, especially at one point I myself was considering to be one. I’m curious now, after you’ve gone through this experience writing this book, being an economist, do you feel now that your calling was to be a writer or do you feel some form of equilibrium between the two lives you’ve led?

Sonali Deraniyagala: Good question. It’s actually much easier to be an economist than to be a writer, that is … especially if you’re trained to be an economist. Writing is a very self-conscious act, isn’t it? I find writing very hard to do because you’re always conscious. If you’re writing fiction, it may be different, but I don’t think I can write fiction. But if you’re writing anything in the realm of nonfiction where you are part of it, I think that’s quite hard to trust it. I think that’s a very difficult thing to do. Whereas being an economist is an easy, you’re in a relatively easy act.

Coming back to my friend Michael Ondaatje, he has got a very new book of poems out. And I did a Q&A with him last week in New York on the book. And there are some gorgeous poems and there’s one called “Definition.” And in that it’s about a Sanskrit dictionary and only a poet can say, looking at words in a Sanskrit dictionary, there’s a word for an alcove where coin washers sit and the fingers are glinting and silver and so on.

And he’s got a line in there which says, “Definitions push open. Everywhere you look, definitions push open a door.” Now that’s in poetry, in fiction, in even creative nonfiction. And for economists, I said to him, it’s completely the opposite. We use definitions to bolt the doors shut so that it’s really, what we are saying is very precise.

So it’s a very different way of thinking. But so if I say write about, I don’t know, poverty rates in South Sudan between 2000 and 2005, you’re only going to write about poverty rates. If you write about inequality, I didn’t ask you about inequality, so we are using definitions and we are bolting the door shut. Whereas here is a case of opening doors, and I think there’s a difference there.

Audience 6: Full disclosure. The questions you were asked for workshop, this one isn’t. So forgive me, but I hope you’ll appreciate the honesty. You’ve mentioned throughout the discussion that in memoir it’s not what happened, but what someone made out of the experience that matters. And I wrote that down, specifically thinking about part one in your memoir where you’re in the hospital and you’re almost hesitant to even acknowledge questions about the experience and almost refusing to talk about it because it would have an impact on the reality of what was happening. And you mentioned that you were in effect trying to shut out reality.

But there was a specific passage in part one where you started looking up images of tsunamis and videos of these things to make it real, you mentioned in your memoir. So I’m wondering, did seeing these images add a deeper layer to what you were feeling and help you in the grieving process? And then furthermore, as you were writing and you published, did writing about this experience ever establish a disconnect between you and the experience? Perhaps by talking about it too much and it becoming almost a narrative, I’m interested in that relationship between the conversation and reality.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Great question. Very good. Looking at images, I think probably it’s quite a superficial thing. It doesn’t deepen your understanding of what happened. So probably not. I mean that was just something you do because you don’t know what else to do in that moment. So you kind of look at images and then I’m sure people who go through various violent situations may seek images and so on. I would say it doesn’t do anything. Might make it a bit more real, but probably not because your idea of it is very different to a photographer’s idea of what happened. And you never see a tsunami like this show in a photograph because taken from a different place and so on.

About does it make you detach by writing about it? Actually, I’d say it makes you attach more rather than detach because to write about it deeply, to write about anything deeply, you really have to get close to it and descend and descend and descend. And so I mean, I did it to the best of my ability. I really did get really trying to recall what exactly did it feel like, what exactly it was, and noting. I noted down things very early on, not knowing that I’m going to use it for anything, just for my own sake, that, “Oh God, this completely biblical otherworldly thing happened to me. Let me just at least write some basic comments about what happened.”

And it’s very important just as a human being to attach to these experiences in a way rather than, that’s my feeling, detach from it because then that makes you not bond with it, but understand it in a deeper way. And yeah, you cohere rather than be this disjointed person that cannot cope with this or that. I find personally I had to cohere with the worst reality on the planet and that was what enabled me to stand up again. So that was …

Audience 6: Thank you.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Yeah.

Ramona Naddaff: We have one last question here.

Audience 7: Hi. Thank you very much. My question concerns adaptation. How would you feel if your work was adapted for theater, movie, TV, etc. How would you feel about that? And if you did go forward with that, what would be your motivation knowing that the work is very personal.

Sonali Deraniyagala: Actually, I had a blanket “no” to any adaptation. So from the moment the book came out, and I also didn’t do any press, I didn’t do any talk shows or interviews. I did a couple of interviews, I think one with the Guardian. But I was really protected from all of that. So no, I’d hate to see today …

Audience 7: Thank you.

Ramona Naddaff: Well, thank you everyone for being here. And thank you, Sonali.

[Applause]

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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