Jhumpa Lahiri

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Jhumpa Lahiri: Hello, my name is Jhumpa Lahiri, and my first story in The New Yorker magazine was published in 1998, and that story was edited by Roger Angell and Cressida Leyshon. And I’ve been working with Cressida almost exclusively ever since. She’s so incredibly intelligent and is able to see things from way up above in ways that I think I, as the writer, am often still stumbling through very much on the ground.

And so, you can see here in my handwriting I have written “Cressida – 1st edits,” which is always, of course, an incredibly thrilling moment to see the work laid out in these skinny columns. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the thrill of that. I always have to pinch myself when I see these big, wide margins to do all of the—the important work. 

Along with the privilege of being published in The New Yorker magazine, which is one of the greatest privileges a writer can have, is, of course, the added privilege—and also the pitfalls—of being fact-checked by the magazine. So, I think that by now, by 2006, I’ve published a number of stories in the magazine, and I’m aware, and I’m almost kind of anticipating the fact-checker, who’s going to come out and say, “Actually, you know, it was…this is, this was the timeline.” 

And so, you know, that too, I think, I would just add, as I think that being published by the magazine made me more vigilant, shall we say, toward these kinds of—these questions of, sort of how, where fiction, imagined stories, intersect with, well, so-called reality. But in this case, actual, historical reality. I think that was an influence of the magazine, too. And to want to, to strive toward that kind of accuracy.