India, Nov. 1 -- 1This novel collapses the distinction between the world of the living and that of those who have passed away. What excited you most about this approach? My mother brought me up to believe in ghosts, and she always behaved as though they were always among us. Her mother, who had been murdered when I was very young, had been seen haunting her old home, according to several people. My stepmother also believes in ghosts, and still speaks of parts of her house that she believes to be haunted, and who she thinks is there. Thus, it was not difficult for me to bridge these worlds because I have always known that the ghosts are among us. 2What helped you empathise with Alice's situation as a caregiver to Clare, her mother who is mentally ill? My own mother, while not like Clare in many ways (as I am mostly not like Alice), was still a person with very difficult emotional problems, who was sometimes very childlike in her behaviour. That kind of caregiving, of a child for a parent, is very much ingrained in my psyche. 3The journey that Alice undertakes from mourning to healing is cathartic to encounter. What did it do for you as you wrote and rewrote it? I think it is important to remember that Alice is haunted by both the dead and the living. Her mother Clare, though living, is a kind of poltergeist in her behaviour. It was painful for Alice to have to balance her grief over the loss of her grandmother with the aggressions of her mother. I found the section where Clare has returned and haunts the house very difficult to write because Alice feels that her shrine has been desecrated by her own mother. 4What differences have you noticed between how people view bigamy in the US and in India? Well, bigamy is considered horribly shameful and is also illegal in the US, but in India it seems to be more accepted, or at least unshocking. That is part of the story. But the other part is that Alice's grandfather was essentially caught between two selves, the one who fell in love and married in India, and the one expected to marry in the aristocratic tradition of joining bloodlines and businesses. Of course the irony is that, for him, the US was a place of arranged marriages, and India was where he found a love match. Somehow, he managed to live these two lives for decades. 5You've been working on a memoir. What does it feel like to open up your private life for public consumption? I have never had the urge to open up my private life, but what motivated me in this case was a need to talk about my mother, who was an artist and who died of a brain tumour in 2017. Her life and death were extraordinary and difficult and I needed to document them when I had some distance. The memoir is called Our Friend, Art, which is a joke my father always used to make, pretending that when we spoke of art, we were speaking of a man named Art....