All This Could Be Different Book Club Kit

Book Club Kit

All This Could Be Different Sarah Thankam Mathews

An in tr od ucti on to

All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel about a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first-century America Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India.

She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.

But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.

A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose,

All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.

G et t o k n o w

Sarah Thankam Mathews

All This Could Be Different follows recent college graduate Sneha, who moves to Milwaukee, then to Washington, D. C. as she navigates career paths, queer desire, friendships, family, and myriad other issues of adulthood. Lauren Groff calls it “an extraordinary novel, spiny and delicate, scathingly funny and wildly moving.” Here’s more from Sarah Thankam Mathews on writing All This Could Be Different: What motivated you to write this story? What did you want to explore through writing it?

I chose to have a story of will-they-won’t-they romantic love between two queer women be the engine to drive a great deal of the book’s propulsion and suspense, and, along the way and in the periphery, show the textures of close friendship and family and life under capitalism. I don’t live a single-issue life and I didn’t want these characters to either. Really, I wanted to work within the classic form of the bildungsroman while also highlighting some of the essentially conservative aspects of our societal ideas about coming of age.

What should follow the latitude and reprieve of youth?

Taking one’s place in a conventionally ordered world, or pushing on the world order itself to reshape, to accommodate us?

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She is a recipient of a Best American Short Stories 2020 award and fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. All This Could Be Different is her first novel.

W h e n s h e ’s n ot w r it in g Sarah is the founder and one of the lead organizers of the mutual aid network Bed-Stuy Strong.

How do class anxieties and perceived class differences shape the relationship dynamics in the book?

There is no one I’m aware of whose life is untouched by the intersections of race, class, gender, and nationality and immigration status. I and everyone I’m close to all occupy our places within the gridded matrix of racial capitalism. Simultaneously, though, most of us don’t necessarily walk through the world constantly picturing these planes of affinity (race, class) as our first or only conception of self. We move through the world as whole people with specific histories,

F o l lo w

Sarah on socials

brushing up against people with very different histories. I was interested in the generative element of those character collisions around class and race and immigration status. What does it mean to care for someone and to also want what they have? What does it mean to desire someone but to not see the history trailing behind them like jellyfish tentacles? What does it mean to be a friend when you’re both in need?

What do you hope readers take away from the novel?

I hope All This Could Be Different entertains and challenges and comforts its readers. I hope it brings them pleasure.

The task of organizing and sometimes that of good @smathewss

fiction, the way I see it, is not to persuade people that issues matter; it’s to persuade people that they matter, that people matter, despite considerable structural evidence to the contrary. I hope that the novel, in the love and witness it attempts to give its fictional characters, can impart the residual gestures of a large-hearted, relational, gutsy, committed way of moving through the world. If there’s a message in this novel’s workings, it’s that people matter, and that the world is more mutable than we believe. We’re all we’ve got; we have this time; we get to choose what to do with this life. I’m interested in people as sites of wounded but glorious capacity; I’m interested in the art of what’s possible. I think the novel is interested in those things, too.

@smathewss

@sarahthankammathews

Watch Sarah in conversation with Susan Choi

Discussion Questions 1.

All This Could Be Different is set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sneha thinks, “We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real.

Only marketing” (19). Do you agree with this statement? What is your impression of Milwaukee, and did it evolve over the course of the novel?

2.

Examine Sneha’s friendship with Thom. How is their relationship altered by the power dynamics at play in their lives and shared work experience? How do the outside forces that ensnare them (and the rest of us)—from capitalism and immigration status to race and gender—shape their relationship? Do you think certain differences can open chasms of understanding that are too wide to bridge?

3.

Discuss Sneha’s relationship with work and how it is informed by her age, the economic recession, her gender, and her immigration status. (“This is what it means, to come here as an immigrant. You are here on sufferance. You are a form of currency, not a person, and only a person has the right to desire, which is to say, to be difficult” [206].)

Did you recognize yourself in Sneha or any of the other characters in the novel in terms of your own decisions about or attitude toward work?

4.

What do you think is the root of the outsized and seemingly unfounded hostility that Sneha’s downstairs neighbor and property manager, Amy, shows toward her? At various points in the novel, Sneha balks at what she considers an American proclivity for narcissism and brazenness, especially when it comes to expressions of gender and sexuality. For example: “In the past I’d blushed hotly when American teenagers on the TV screen spoke openly, petulantly, brattily to their parents about the birth control pill and intimacy and breakups. Shameless and embarrassing” (109). How did you interpret her surges of disgust and frustration? What is Sneha’s relationship to her own sexuality, and how does it evolve over the course of the novel?

5.

Discuss the clock motif. What did the broken clock in her apartment symbolize for Sneha? What was your reaction to the dramatic clock scene toward the end of the novel?

6.

On page 33, Sneha tells Tig, “I hate my name. I’ve hated it all my life.” Throughout the novel, she avoids saying her name, and is uncomfortable when others invoke it. When the reason for this was finally revealed on page 248, what impact did it have on you?

How did it affect your understanding of her character? Reflect on Sneha’s friendship with Tig. What are the roots of their compatibilities and differences? How does Sneha grow as a result of opening up to Tig and their vision for the Pink House?

7.

Sneha developed numerous coping mechanisms and instincts to shoulder her trauma and shame. How does she protect herself throughout the novel, and to what extent does she shed her assumptions and defenses and transform? How do her past experiences shape her relationships to desire and intimacy?

8.

Sneha lies to Marina instead of delving into the complicated truth of her family history, even though she loves both Marina and her parents deeply in her own ways. Why do you think she gets stuck in this lie? Do you think that relationships can recover and become stronger after a serious breach of trust?

9.

Several characters in the novel struggle with addiction. What did the novel have to say about the different ways people cope with addiction, and the effects it has on friends, families, and romantic relationships?

10.

All This Could Be Different opens with an epigraph from the poet Franny Choi that ends with: “I want an excuse to change my life” (vii). How does Sneha, at different points, embody this? What kind of change do you predict for her after the novel’s final pages?

11.

In the first chapter, Sneha says, “This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit” (4). How have your own experiences of love been shaped by “the other shit”—in other words, the material realities of life? What, in the end, do you think the novel has to say about love?