Tara Menon on Under Water and Writing Grief and Friendship
How You Find Your Voice: Episode 7
In this episode of the How You Find Your Voice podcast, I speak with novelist and professor of English at Harvard, Tara Menon, about her debut novel Underwater, a beautifully written and moving story about friendship, grief and the natural world.
Episode 7 artwork, featuring Tara Menon
The novel follows Marissa and Arielle, two girls who grow up on a small island in Thailand, their lives shaped by the sea and by an intense, all-consuming friendship. It is an idyllic life, but from the very beginning, there is a sense that something terrible is coming.
The story moves between two timelines, the day before the 2004 tsunami and the day before Hurricane Sandy hits New York in 2012. As the present unfolds, memory begins to surface, blurring past and present in a way that mirrors the experience of grief itself.
At the heart of the novel is the loss of a friend. A kind of grief we do not always have the language for, and one that is rarely given the same weight as romantic or familial loss. We talk about what drew Tara to explore this, and how literature has historically struggled to fully recognise the depth of friendship.
The conversation opens out into something wider. We talk about ecological grief and the slow loss of the natural world, and the way the novel holds both personal and environmental loss side by side.
Tara also reflects on her background in literary criticism, and the challenge of moving from analysing novels to writing one. She describes fiction as requiring a kind of letting go, and a willingness to write badly in order to find your way through.
We also talk about observation and attention, how Marissa’s way of seeing the world is shaped both by her loneliness and by a childhood spent alongside scientists, and the way those habits of looking carry through into the novel’s prose.
This episode explores grief, memory, the natural world and the slow, often uncomfortable process of finding your voice.
Topics Covered
• The grief of losing a close friend
• The absence of language around friendship grief
• Dual timelines and writing towards catastrophe
• The 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Sandy
• Memory, trauma and how they shape perception
• The natural world, coral reefs and ecological grief
• Writing the sea and underwater environments
• Manta rays and animal behaviour
• Greek mythology and literary references
• Male entitlement and the experience of women in cities
• Tourism, colonialism and exploitation
• Moving from literary criticism to fiction writing
• Letting go of control in the creative process
• Finding your voice as a writer
About Tara Menon
Tara Menon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Nation, Paris Review and Public Books, where she co-edits the Literary Fiction section. Tara was born in India, grew up in Singapore, spent a decade in New York, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can read more about Tara Menon and Under Water here.
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For more on Tara Menon and her novel, Under Water see here.