Folio prize-winner Akhil Sharma’s long journey from private despair to public honour

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/26/folio-prize-winner-akhil-sharma-family-life

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It would have been bad luck, explained Akhil Sharma on collecting the Folio prize for fiction this week, to have planned an acceptance speech beforehand. And so his words on winning were halting and spontaneous, as he admitted that he had been nine years overdue in delivering the manuscript. The delay was caused by crippling depression while tackling the novel’s thorny subject matter, as well as wrestling 7,000 pages of draft material down to just over 200. Luck, good and bad, pervades Family Life, the harrowing yet darkly humorous second novel based on his own childhood experiences – dominated by a tragic swimming pool accident when Sharma was 10, which left his 14-year-old brother permanently brain-damaged.

“I had been feeling really unhappy because I just didn’t want to be involved in rejection,” Sharma tells me when we meet the morning after the ceremony. “When they made the announcement I thought I had misheard. Then I went up to receive the award and it felt strange, it felt very strange. I felt a lot of shame. I almost felt like crying, like I’d done something wrong, because I’d received this piece of luck.” He explains his complicated emotional response as “survivor’s guilt” - an emotion that has long haunted him, and also haunts his novel.

Sharma is unflinching when he describes the events that shaped the book – a few devastating moments which had a ripple-effect on whole lifetimes. The family had recently emigrated from Dellhi to New York, and Sharma’s parents had pinned their hopes on their academic elder son. But one summer day, disaster struck. “My brother dived into the swimming pool, struck his head on the bottom and then remained under water for about three minutes. He drew water into his lungs which caused his lungs to collapse. Then they pulled him out. But even when they pulled him out, because his lungs had collapsed, he wasn’t getting any oxygen. And the oxygen deprivation caused massive brain damage.”

Ever since, Sharma’s awareness of his own good fortune has come tempered with guilt: “When I walk down the street, I’m aware that I can walk down the street and my brother can’t. I’m 43 years old and I have a life full of freedom versus my parents who were stuck taking care of my brother. I got to come to America when I was a child versus my parents who had to start all over again as adults.” Yet Sharma knows that overcoming that sense of guilt and enjoying his success – so much of which has been down to his great talent for describing the failure of both the human body and mind – is crucial: “I think it’s a good thing to be grateful. If we’re lucky enough to have these good things, we should honour them. It is wasteful and dishonourable to not take joy in them. I honour my parents’ sacrifices.”

The agonising aftermath of the accident is depicted in lucid detail in Family Life, from the gnawing worries about money – since the family have to hire a full-time nurse to help care for the brain-damaged Birju – to the narrator Ajay’s sense of alienation, and his father’s alcoholism. “It took a while to even begin to take in all that had occurred. My mother would believe that God could fix things. Even though my brother was blind, she thought he might one day wake up and be able to see.” In the novel, the family home is flooded by futile visits from “miracle workers”; a woman who thinks turmeric powder will provide a cure, an elderly man whose treatment involves reading facts about Birju from a yellow legal pad.

The hoped-for new beginning of an immigrant family turns into a desperation to make ends meet. There are emotional pressures too: Ajay experiences racist bullying at school and is deeply uncomfortable in his own skin (“In my guilt and shame, I wanted to fight, to be nothing like myself”). Fantasies of a different, better, life flare against a benighted reality, and characters cling to “the possibility of escape”.

Ajay’s powerful sense of dislocation is also drawn from Sharma’s own experience. “Both my books are intensely autobiographical. The first, An Obedient Father, is about shame and guilt. I felt all this guilt and I had to find something a character had done that had been deserving of guilt. Whereas I think of Family Life as an absolute love song to my parents: these are people who had enormous difficulties but were loyal and brave and they endured.”

A strain of autobiographical fiction runs through this year’s Folio prize shortlist, including All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, which draws on the author’s experience of her elder sister’s suicide. What does Sharma make of this trend, and has the reception of such work changed over the years that he’s been writing? “Strong books generate a response, they can create their own audience. It’s not so much that the audience has been waiting, more like these two things have to come together.”

In its exploration of human flaws, his novel’s tone strikes the perfect pitch: “These are people who behaved badly at times, but if I’d created people that behaved fantastically all the time I wouldn’t be honouring my parents, their humanity and their suffering.” Amid the harshest of human experiences, there is also tenderness. Ajay remembers an “image of love”: his mother looking so intently at his father that “she seemed to be memorising him”.

“My life matters much more to me than my writing,” says Sharma. “As a life decision it at times seemed like a bad decision to have written this book due to the pure misery it involved”, he continues, recalling the 13 years it took to complete the novel, while battling depression. What stopped him from giving up? “I’d invested so much time in it that I couldn’t back out. I would write for five hours a day and then just forget it, because I couldn’t bear to think about it. I just had to get it done.” What has been his greatest challenge as a writer? “Endurance. Just to keep working when you feel so bad and so hopeless.”

At his lowest ebb it was the kindness of both friends and strangers that helped him endure. He found “great comfort” from focusing on other people, simply sitting by the Hudson River and watching passers-by. “What really helped was praying for them, that they have good health and peace of mind. I don’t believe in God but I pray and for me it’s a form of directive meditation”, he says. “Engaging with other people soothes me as it makes me think a little bit less about myself.” Is this where the imaginative human engagement that so pervades his work began? “It’s empathy. And I also like [Thomas] Hardy’s phrase ‘loving-kindness’.”

Crucially, Sharma also developed stylistic techniques to express what was unbearable in life: he distilled sensual details to “thin out” a reality which would otherwise be “overwhelming” – less was more when it came to conveying such a brutal experience. He favoured dialogue over exposition, re-drafted from the third person to the first, and stripped away sentimentality, giving the novel an even greater emotional weight.

For all the effort involved in writing, Sharma acknowledges that “a book doesn’t do its magic until someone opens it”. He describes how the novel, a year on from publication, is beginning to get taught on writing courses and in medical schools: “I’m very grateful for that. I would like this book to be useful … and to do good in the world.” One person who has yet to open it, though, is Sharma’s father, who – not being a great reader – advised his son that the best way to keep a secret was by putting it in a novel. This perhaps accounts in part for the book’s raw honesty: “Speaking the truth made me feel powerful,” explains Ajay the narrator.

For all its pain and suffering, the novel celebrates the transformative power of both writing and reading. The narrator describes the epiphany of first reading Ernest Hemingway: “I began to see my family’s pain as belonging in a story.” From then on even the cruellest playground taunts become creative seeds. “As I wrote, I felt proud at my toughness for taking whatever was happening to me and turning it into something else.”

One of the great pieces of luck in Sharma’s life, it seems, has been discovering the power of literature: “Reading takes away your loneliness”, he says. “I remember reading passages of Shakespeare about grief and thinking, that’s just what I felt. I didn’t want to stop crying for my brother because I didn’t want to lose him. I felt less lonely when reading, and when we’re made less lonely, you think: this is my suffering, but this is also what it means to be a human being.”

• Family Life by Akhil Sharma is published by Faber. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop.