Author Abraham Verghese: I have this belief that a writer provides the words, the reader provides their imagination, and in the middle space is this mental movie.

But it belongs to you, to the reader.

Host Marcia Franklin: Coming up, I talk with bestselling author Dr. Abraham Verghese about his newest novel, "The Covenant of Water."

That's "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference," next.

Stay with us.

(MUSIC) Announcer: Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Franklin: Hello and welcome.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

When Abraham Verghese was a teenager, he read a book that changed the course of his life.

"Of Human Bondage," by Somerset Maugham, is a story of a shy young man with a disability who eventually finds his calling as a doctor.

The novel touched Verghese so deeply that he decided he also wanted to pursue a career in medicine.

50 years later, he's not only a renowned physician and professor, but also the bestselling author of four books, including "My Own Country," "Cutting for Stone," and his latest novel, "The Covenant of Water."

It's an epic tale of intersecting lives in Kerala, India, that spans seven decades.

I sat down with Dr. Verghese at the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference to learn more about what compelled him to spend 10 years writing the book, its relationship to his own family history, and the importance of the conference in his life.

Franklin: Dr. Verghese, it's wonderful to see you again.

It's been 14 years.

Verghese: Has it really been that long?

Franklin: Yes.

We last spoke in 2009.

So much has happened in the world, in our lives, not the least of which is that you have another bestselling book out.

So congratulations on that.

Verghese: Thank you.

Franklin: And not only is it out and a bestseller, but it's got already this little imprimatur on it, "Oprah's Book Club."

She has really gone to town, so to speak with this.

She loves it and has done a podcast.

What has this been like for you?

Verghese: Well, it's actually made all the difference.

You know, just being an "Oprah's Pick" bumps a book up considerably, but none of us factored in her enthusiasm.

So I feel tremendously honored.

It's just been a huge, huge blessing.

And getting to know her personally -- she's an incredibly well-read woman and also very, very wise.

And so I really benefited from her mentorship, I should say.

Franklin: And I think I heard you say that you had hoped your first book would be an "Oprah's Pick."

Verghese: Yeah, I actually lit candles for "Cutting for Stone" to be one of her picks, and I thought it fit what I thought I knew of her tastes -- you know, Africa and women's issues of genital mutilation in Africa.

And so I told her that story and we both concluded that the candle did work.

It's just that God's time is not our time.

(Laughs.)

Franklin: Are you learning more about your own book as you go deep into it with interviews like her and the public?

Are you seeing things in it that you didn't even see when you wrote it?

Verghese: Yes, I am.

It's funny you should ask that, because when I began, my elevator pitch was that this was an epic story about one family, three generations.

And it is all that.

But the thing that seems to echo with readers is really that it's about strong women.

It's about strong, heroic women, you know, a quiet kind of heroism, the kind that allows you to just go on every day despite setbacks and tragedies and relying on sheer willpower, faith, ritual.

Which is the story of my grandmothers, both of them.

And I don't know that I set out with that ambition, but it's become very clear to me.

I mean, you have a lot of fictional characters, mothers who are often depicted as evil or flawed.

And in fact, some of the criticism for this book from an otherwise glowing review in the New York Times was that I had too many good characters.

But I really believe that most of us are inherently good.

We make horrible mistakes from time to time, but we're always trying to correct, and I think that's what I wrote about and that seems to be the thing that echoes with readers.

Franklin: Some of the genesis for this, speaking of women, was a remarkable document that your own mother not only penned but also drew for your niece, her granddaughter, when the young girl asked her about her life.

Verghese: Yeah.

Franklin: Can you describe that for our viewers, and how much of a role it played in kind of setting the tenor for this book?

Verghese: Sure.

Yeah.

So when my mother was in her seventies and retired to Florida -- and mind you she'd had an incredible life.

She was born in India in the 1920s and just about the time of independence from Britain after centuries of occupation, she finished her college degree, a master's in physics, but there were no jobs to be had.

And so she saw this ad for Ethiopia, teaching.

Can you imagine a single woman in a sari heading out by steamer or steamship to go to this country she had to find on a map?

And she taught there for many years and then at some point got her master's degree from Columbia Teacher's College and wound up eventually coming to America, teaching in New Jersey.

And so at that point in her life when she had sort of finished her active career, for her five-year-old granddaughter to say "Ammachi" -- which means "grandmother" -- "What was it like when you were five years old?"

My mother was just taken aback by that question.

It just challenged her.

And so she wrote out this wonderful notebook full of anecdotes of her childhood -- all of which we'd heard -- and illustrated (it), because she was a great artist.

And she wrote that in her seventies, and I was well aware of it.

We all had copies.

But I picked it up again when she was in her nineties and by then living in Palo Alto close to me.

And as I kept looking for the geography for my next novel, picking that up again made me wonder why I had resisted setting a novel there for so long.

I think part of it is about authority.

I wasn't born in India; I was born in Africa.

And yet I was very familiar with Kerala, going there every summer for vacation and later going to medical school in India and visiting my grandparents fairly often.

But that book and the richness of those anecdotes and the sense that we were a very small, interesting community, very distinct from many other communities in India by our religion; we are orthodox Christians from the time of St. Thomas is the legend.

So that's what happened.

You're right.

My mother really was the inspiration for setting the story there.

Franklin: The beginning of the book, which is quite compelling, is an 11-year-old girl -- do I have her age correct?

-- who is married off to a man much, much older, I think older than her own mother.

This is a type of scene that might make people in our own culture squeamish.

She also -- there's not a lot of strife in the beginning.

There's not a lot of fear, as we might suppose.

Talk to us about that, because some people might say that's getting off, that that situation is being treated too lightly, a young girl marrying a much older man.

Verghese: It was a very risky thing to begin with, to begin a book with that.

And yet that was the story of my great-grandmother, who went on to have a wonderful marriage by all accounts.

They had a tremendous marriage.

The richness of it I never forgot, in terms of how people talked about it.

I mean, I kind of liked the idea of playing against the grain.

I mean, the reader's every expectation is that this is going to go badly.

And I think, without giving too much away, the beautiful thing is how respectful he was of her and sort of kept his distance completely.

And he was sort of a fearsome-looking character, a strong man, and he knew how easily he could intimidate her.

And so it's the slow development of her understanding of who he is and ultimately her coming of age.

I sort of liked the idea of playing with that, and it wasn't based on some perversion in my mind where -- I was describing the reality of that era, the 1900s.

Franklin: And of course, she does come to be an incredibly strong woman and the center of this story.

Verghese: Which I liked.

I mean I liked the idea of beginning with this waif of a girl who has no agency and by, by the end of the book and well before that, she has become the matriarch of this, of this family, one of the heroic figures we were talking about earlier.

Franklin: Could you talk a little bit about the title?

First, "water."

It's infused throughout the whole book.

Kerala has a lot of rivers in it.

There's Christian faith in here, and water obviously is part of baptism.

Why, why did you want water to be so prevalent in this to the point where the center condition that many of the characters have has to do with drowning?

Verghese: Well, I think the most important decision I made when I was writing this book was "where."

Because I really believe that geography is destiny.

Um, and it's an inescapable thing to visit Kerala, this narrow strip of coastal territory just about 19 miles wide at its widest.

Mountains on one side, ocean on the other.

And on these fertile slopes, spices grow wild.

41 rivers running to the sea and a latticework of canals and backwaters and lagoons, kind of like a giant circulatory system that connects everybody, with the monsoon being the annual beating heart, if you like.

And you know, it's a metaphor you can't resist if you're going to set a story there.

You know, we are 70% water as human beings.

We are -- we develop as embryos in water.

It's sort of a constant, inescapable part of our lives.

And as you said, part of the ritual of many religions.

You know, in Islam, you wash the feet and hands and face before you go into the mosque.

And in Christianity, we baptize in water.

And so that part was easy to explain.

"Covenant," because I think -- I love the word "covenant."

It has a great ring to it.

And so given the ubiquity of water in this setting, I love the idea of bringing in a rare disease, which ironically puts the individuals afflicted at great peril from water.

I mean, keep in mind that most people in Kerala swim before they walk.

I mean, they literally swim before they walk.

Because water's everywhere.

And so to have an individual who's scared of water and nonetheless manages to drown in the most inauspicious, you know, kinds of places you shouldn't be drowning in -- shallow ponds, ditches, irrigation ditches -- I thought that was interesting.

Franklin: The "covenant" part of the title -- a covenant is an agreement.

And it's referenced several times in people talking about, particularly in a religious sense.

Could you expand on that more then, the agreement, the covenant?

Verghese: Well, I am resisting only because my thesis is that titles should be a little mysterious.

It's not like the author has the key.

With my previous book, "Cutting for Stone," I was often asked, and there was sort of one explanation that I had, but it certainly wasn't the explanation.

So I have this belief that a writer provides the words, the reader provides their imagination, and in the middle space is this mental movie, but it belongs to you, to the reader, and it's up to the reader to sort of make what they want of it.

In my mind, it was the covenant of you know, mother to child, the covenant of these people to the faith -- which was very, very strong -- a covenant of secrecy around this disease because it would affect the marital prospects of the family.

Then there were a lot of other little covenants, some of them very obvious, some of them hidden, that operate in the book as a kind of conceit right through the book.

So the reader has to sort of decide what that means.

Franklin: Fair enough.

Um, the "condition," so to speak, of drowning even in areas where there isn't a lot of water, that is based on an actual condition.

And without giving anything away, there is another strong female character who investigates what this might be.

But it does have its basis in fact.

Verghese: Yes, yes.

I mean, I'm, I'm a longtime teacher of medicine.

I'm a professor and I've taught at the bedside for many, many years.

And I love to keep in my back pocket, so to speak, a number of rare diseases that I will shout and ask my residents or students a question such as, you know, "What do you think of a elderly man with a glass eye, a big liver and jaundice?

What comes to mind?"

There is an answer for, to these riddles.

Well, one of those diseases that I tucked away was an instance, well-described, of a kindred in Pennsylvania, I believe, with familial drowning, where one or more members drowned in the most unusual places.

They became disoriented in water.

And so I use that particular entity as the conceit that runs through the book.

Franklin: Yeah, really, really interesting.

Now, this is a large book.

It is 70-plus years.

Do I have that correct?

An epic story of a family.

Why did you want to have this epic over such a long period of time?

Verghese: Yeah, first of all, I really wasn't thinking about the length of the book.

But I am drawn to epic novels in my own reading.

I mean, I think all writers are first of all readers.

And I love that sensation of picking up a book and uh, you know, living through generations and world events, and when you finally put the book down, it's just Tuesday.

I mean, I don't know of anything in our lives that can stop time the way a book can when you enter it and enter this fictional dream.

So I've always had the ambition to write those kinds of books.

Um, not to say I wouldn't write a short book, but I'm drawn to those stories.

And, you know, the length really wasn't a consideration for me.

I think it is for a lot of editors.

It is for a lot of publishing houses.

I mean, I actually left one publishing house to go to another one because our vision didn't seem to align.

But I was blessed with a brilliant young editor, Peter Blackstock at Grove Atlantic, and he said as soon as after we met, he said, you know, "A book needs to be as long as it needs to be."

He didn't bring up length at all, and he was amazingly confident that the length was not an issue.

And I've had a number of comments, beginning with Oprah, who said she reached a point in the book and looked to see how many pages were left, not because you know, she was frustrated that -- she didn't want it to end.

And so I actually have a folder in my email box for the "did not want it to end."

And I put it there just to, to a) admire Peter's confidence in being able to say that, "the story needs to be as long as it needs to be."

But secondly, to remind myself that, you know, the goal is a good story well told, and you can't be pandering to current tastes.

All of that stuff is ephemeral you know; a hundred years from now it'll be another taste.

And I think one should be writing for the ages.

You want the story to reflect what you want it to do.

Franklin: Well, back to the title -- "covenant."

The word "covenant."

There's a covenant with the reader as well.

Verghese: Absolutely.

Franklin: And if the story is compelling enough and the writing is good enough, the length doesn't matter.

Verghese: Exactly.

Franklin: It's the covenant that you have that "I'm going to take you on a journey."

And at that point, time, space, dimension doesn't really matter anymore.

Verghese: I mean, it comes with tremendous responsibility.

I have to be sure that the things I'm asking their reader to pick up and put in their backpack as they climb up this mountain are all necessary.

And that's where a good editor comes in.

I think it reflects something cultural.

You know, when your attention span is at the TikTok level -- and this is not critical, I enjoy that kind of flash of dopamine surge -- it takes some time to sort of appreciate the slow pleasure of a long book.

I manage to do both.

But in our culture, I think increasingly we're going to the short bursts of dopamine, as opposed to the life-changing sense of a long, epic novel.

Franklin: Well, what's interesting now is people have so many choices, and one of them is they can listen to it.

And you read this.

Verghese: I do.

(Laughs.)

Franklin: All the voices.

It took you, I want to say, two weeks or something to record?

Verghese: Three and a half weeks.

Franklin: Three and a half weeks.

Verghese: Yeah.

Franklin: Doctor, your voice carries so much emotion at times when you read this book.

And it is another way that, you know, I'd encourage people if they do feel daunted by the length to listen to it.

Verghese: Yeah.

Franklin: But you can hear your voice breaking at times.

These characters as you're reading them are in you.

Verghese: Yeah, it was actually such an interesting experience.

I would say in general, if you find a writer reading their own work, it's a red flag.

Steer away.

I mean, honestly, because you know, that's not what we do.

We write; we're not trained to perform.

You have to actually perform a book.

And so I decided to audition, literally, because I thought if there's someone who can do this better, hats off to them.

But I felt that I could do the ethnic phrases and the nuances of the accent of a Kerala person versus a Tamilian -- upper crust Tamilian -- and so on.

But I had to learn a lot.

I mean, I really had to learn how to perform the book.

I had a wonderful producer in the studio and sound technicians, and they were really helpful.

So I had to learn how to vary my pitch in dialogue so that you could indicate the gender of the speaker, but not too much.

I had to take on all these accents, but not too much.

And it was emotional.

I mean, every time we got to one of the death scenes in the book, all of us were reaching for the Kleenex.

I mean, and you would think that I would be immune to this.

But even in the revision, every time I got there, it was really, really moving to me.

Franklin: How long did it take to write this, and how do you know when to stop?

Verghese: (Laughs) Well, good question.

I've only been at it for about 10 years, and that was not intentional.

I didn't think it would take that long.

But I think what happens is I don't know the whole story, so I spend a lot of time using the writing to sort of explore.

And sometimes it's a terrible dead-end.

Other times it's very fruitful.

And so, you know, there were some setbacks along the way.

And then Covid was a major disruptor.

I'm an infectious disease person, and not that I was on the front line all the time by any means, but I was part of the administration and trying to help with our responses.

And so, very, very interesting times.

But, you know, I love my day job.

I'm not in any great hurry to produce a book.

And you know, I was just reading that Joyce Carol Oates has something like 67 novels and 40 non-fiction books, and you know, they're all good.

They're wonderful.

I simply am reconciled to the fact that I don't have that kind of productivity.

I'm not aiming for it.

Franklin: Your medical knowledge and experience undergirds this whole novel.

I mean, not only is there the "condition," which we've spoken about, about drowning, but there is a major role in discussing leprosy, and then there are many other surgeries involved.

Was this a delight for you to be able to also put some of your background in medicine into the novel?

Verghese: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think, I wouldn't quite know how to write any other way.

Because I think of medicine as "life plus plus."

I'm not writing about something completely foreign to any reader because we're all at some point or other encountering medicine.

So when Tom Clancy writes about submarines, it's intriguing to me, but I likely won't get into a submarine.

On the other hand, I was told a long time ago -- I think it's true -- that readers have an inherent curiosity about medicine because it involves them.

And so I feel like it's a natural that I would bring it in, but I'm not apologetic, because to me, medicine is "life plus plus."

Franklin: Is it helpful for you to have a muse to write?

Verghese: When I sit down to write, a lot of the times it's just, you know, it's just pushing this along, trying your best.

But every now and then, you sit down to write and what comes out isn't what you planned, and God knows where that's coming from.

Is it the right-brain God, the muse, in the Greek sense of the muse?

But I mean, I do believe that you have to sit down in the chair to begin.

You have to apply yourself regularly.

And if you do that, the most mysterious, interesting things happen.

Proust says that every reader reading a book is also reading themselves.

And if there's a ring of truth, it's because something in the book echoes with their own lives.

And you know, once you've done it once, you wonder if you can do it again, so you keep trying.

And it's been a wonderful -- I don't play golf, so this is what I do.

(Laughs.)

Franklin: As we wrap up, the Sun Valley Writers' Conference has played a role in your life since you first came here.

In fact, you acknowledge the conference at the end of the book.

And this year you have been awarded the "Writer in the World Award" by the conference, which comes with a nice monetary award as well.

But in that award, it recognizes a writer whose "life's work embodies a rare combination of literary talent and moral imagination, helping us to better understand the work and our place in it."

First of all, congratulations.

Verghese: Thank you.

Franklin: But talk about the conference and this award if you'd like, but the role that this conference and this setting has played for you in your life.

Verghese: Well, the conference -- and the award is huge -- and I'm really tremendously honored by it.

The conference -- I was invited here 20-plus years ago, and it was transformative.

I remember the first time I came, I was sitting next to Frank McCourt or David Halberstam and William Styron and William Merwin; some of them became friends.

And to my good fortune, I was invited back.

And I've lived in places like El Paso, Texas; Johnson City, Tennessee; San Antonio, and you know, Iowa City.

I've never really had a literary community, partly because of the nature of my work.

And so this felt like my literary home every year, even though it was just a short time.

Those were the friends I kept, and those were the people I sought out.

And so this place is tremendously important to me.

It is I think the creative spark for me that I carry for of the year.

You know, we were talking about geography as destiny.

This geography is particularly special.

So, I have a lot of Idaho connections, not just coming here.

My sister-in-law -- my brother used to work in Boise.

He married a Boise girl.

So there's that connection, too -- deep, deep affection for this state and for this particular geography.

Franklin: Well, congratulations again.

Verghese: Thank you.

Franklin: And thank you so much for taking time out of what I know is an incredibly busy schedule for you here to talk with me, and by proxy, our viewers.

I really appreciate it.

Verghese: Very welcome.

It was my honor.

Thank you so much.

Franklin: You've been listening to Dr. Abraham Verghese discuss his novel, "The Covenant of Water."

Our conversation was recorded at the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to our team and to the conference organizers for all their help.

If you'd like to watch any of the 75 conversations we recorded at the event over the years, including a 2009 interview with Dr. Verghese, you'll find them on the Idaho Public Television YouTube channel and website.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

Thanks for spending time with us.

(Music) Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.