This is my newsletter #13: Revathi Suresh

Dear reader,

My name is Revathi Suresh, and I am a writer, parent and homemaker (yay to all glory and no money). I struggle sometimes to juggle those three identities and more often than not, allow the first to take a back seat because I don’t have too much faith in it, or rather, even with two legitimate books behind me, belief in myself as a writer. 

I like the idea of learning about myself even if it means I don’t like what I see; I am happy to learn from people younger than me and enjoy listening to stories about how they experience the world. Thank you, Rohini, for inviting me to put together this edition of This Is My Newsletter. 

I’ve lived my life in a daze, in an unremarkable bubble. The terribly awkward introverted kid I was grew up to be a miserably shy adult, sure she wouldn’t amount to anything much. I stumbled into a great job, but then I got married and gave it up to raise a family. The only thing I continued to do for myself, without much hooha or splishsplash, was write. And even with that I never pushed myself, so no grabbing type of opportunity ever came my way, and in my own head I sort of faded away. 

Through the worst of my nothing years, as I think of them, I read and savoured the writing of Sue Grafton (photographed above); her detective Kinsey Millhone took up residence in my head as the embodiment of female empowerment. She’s single through most of her fictional life (her romantic entanglements quickly fizzle out or are briskly swept out of the way, allowing her to get on with the business of being alone) fiercely independent, content with little, with no friends bar an octogenarian landlord she also has a crush on. She has no cats, hates dogs (ouch) though she’s persistent as one when she scents a mystery. She’s blunt, often tactless, sometimes reckless, always honest (unpleasant even) occasionally vulnerable, ever resourceful, super organised, undeniably brave, and unfailingly funny and snarky. And most of all, so very everyday ordinary in the best possible way. 

I would like to think Grafton has had the greatest influence on my writing, not because I created characters like hers or have crafted an exceptional writing life, but because her deceptively simple style stuck in my head as the one to emulate. Dense descriptive prose would never come to me, but I wondered if I could teach myself how to build situations and bring out character through dialogue the way she did.

In the end, I didn’t make it through the whole alphabet series (Grafton worked her way down till Y and died before she wrote Z) because from R or S, it simply fizzled out for me. 

Recently, I started reading the series from the top and find it has aged well for the most part. In Kinsey Millhone, you have the ultimate feminist and everywoman. Maybe she’s “nothing much” in terms of how one might define conventional success, but she stands firm and tall (always in jeans and turtlenecks) on her tiny patch of ground and that’s what makes her a role model for all time.

In the last few months I have, on most days, entertained myself doing crosswords. I don’t attempt cryptic or hard ones because I want to feel smart all the time. I have a thing for the NYT and LA Times Mini Crosswords, where the words I guess almost instantly are non-words like aww and wowza. I think in grunts and therefore I must be an emoji? But a simple, straightforward one if you want to feel like you might possibly own a brain is The Guardian’s Quick Crossword. The Washington Post has an Easy Crossword that can make you feel like a vocab queen, while the LA Times’ Daily Crossword starts boringly easy on Monday and gets quite challenging by Sunday. Needless to say, I skip the Sundays.

I only recently discovered Death Cab for Cutie. I know, such a shame, but better late than never. Does anyone else listen as closely to snatches of songs that play as fillers in movies and TV series? I’m an obsessive, inveterate collector of obscure (to me, because somehow everyone else knows the song already) music. Credits medleys are the worst. You just catch micro seconds of some lyrics that pass by in a blur, and have so little to work with. Anyhow, that’s how I discovered The Bird and The Bee, and rediscovered The Turtles, more specifically Happy Together.

But to loop back to my own writing. In the early part of this century, I realised that there was such a thing as writing commissioned stories for children. The client gave me a brief and drew me an outline and I just had to complete the picture and colour in the details. Most of these small story books were educational or informative and I could churn them out fairly fast and they were fun to write. Guided creative writing is how I think of them. In 2010, just for a lark, I began to write my first novel, Jobless Clueless Reckless, about teenage life as I saw it play out around me. The title, by the way, was all about me and the place I found myself in. I laughed my way through the whole writing process, enormously entertained by my endeavour, but miraculously the book got published (Duckbill, 2013) and with that working title glued to it, to boot.

By and by I came to understand that I had, without intending to and with no awareness of what I was putting into the book, touched upon a number of themes related to teenage. It therefore struck a chord with many readers (though there were others who never quite got the point of it and felt quite irritated by it) The standalone sequel to JCR, as it has been manageably abbreviated, was published as an ebook in August this year (1inchmargin, 2020). It’s called In Now & Then and brings back all the main characters from the first book, and explores more fully the themes that had only been hinted at in the first instance. This book I took very seriously and worked really hard at, and I think it shows. In Now & Then is available worldwide on Amazon Kindle. Do check it out.