Reviews and the debut author

I usually skim reviews of my book, leaping across the paragraphs that describe the plot, my eyes now trained to scan for knowledgeable comment and of course, praise. It is as much an exercise in vanity as it is in humility. "Hey! Another reviewer likes my book!" but "Oh hey, they haven't gone into its soul, perhaps it is just like every other book they've liked." Maybe it's greed, maybe it's a realisation that while reviewers of non-fiction will judge the plot, facts and writing, few can really tell me anything about the book that I don't already know. 

Why do I want this? Because writing it was a lonely process, and while I can pretend I was in control of every one of the 100,000 words in it, the truth is that on many mornings, I took a gamble. Here's the speech I gave to myself multiple times: "I have to write 1000 words today, so here, let me write about Sarva's mother cooking for him, and maybe that will get me a 1000 words closer to finishing this book, argh!" Many decisions were instinctive. Answers to plot questions - Do I reveal this horror here, or is it to soon? - or location descriptions - Do I need all this blah blah about the house? - or even facts - How can I write accurately about this hospital bombing when I have witness accounts but official denials? - were often made simply on a certain feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was writing a book for the first time in my life. What did I know? Of course, my editor loved it, but he was on my side. So was my husband. So was my kind writing companion. Can someone who thinks nothing of me, hasn't seen my face or eaten my (very good) rasam rice, please tell me what works or doesn't and whether I should be allowed to do this at all? 
 
Thankfully, this eagerness to know if my gambles paid off is only rare. But it rears it ugly head occasionally. It makes my breath quicken every time I see a review. One of the earliest reviews in India, by Aditya Sinha in Mint overwhelmed me with how well it conveyed my unsaid intention: 

Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble... takes a micro view of the war’s end by, metaphorically speaking, selecting a couple of the corpses from under that loose tile and telling their stories, and the intimate stories-within-those-stories. It depicts the past as that which cannot be escaped, and memory as a tool for survival.

Now, this review in Art Review by Niru Ratnam is one of the few that explores the book's struggle with truth, as vague, compromised, and crucial as it is in times of conflict. It was published some months ago, but I only saw it this week. He begins by quoting me from page 368: 

About halfway through her 368-page study of the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, Rohini Mohan writes about the problems of quantifying its effects: ‘In the cacophony of different accounts, attempts to measure the cost of the conflict – the counting of the dead, lost, disappeared, raped or displaced… became fraught with motives and desired ends. Propaganda eclipsed facts, denial extinguished compassion. The war’s end produced two aggressive parallel narratives, which ran fast and strong, never meeting.’

Agreeing how difficult it was to write about Sri Lanka when facts, histories, and timelines have long been contested by all sides, Ratnam sees my focus on three personal narratives rather than the documentary approach as "brave". 

Mohan confidently restages her characters’ motives, thoughts and conversations even when they might be hazy recollections in the minds of her very real subjects. It is a brave move – one that puts an element of creative writing into the most fraught of arenas. But if the ‘facts’ are so contested by both sides as to form a block to any dialogue, perhaps this is not as unlikely a strategy as it might first seem... Mohan is able to generate a highly nuanced account. 

Other than this, it is readers' reviews via email that have really told me things I couldn't possibly have imagined: what parts of the book people loved, which characters they identified with, what made them have to stop, the reason they recommended it to certain friends, why they felt lost after they finished, and how they'd have preferred a proper resolution in the end. Someone said it was their mother's first English book. Someone else - another journalist - said it made him jealous. A writer from Sri Lanka said it didn't tell them anything new, but hey, Rohini, thank you for writing. It is not negative or positive feedback, it is considered, deeply personal reaction that I have come to cherish.