Your job doesn’t have to define you. As a teen, I wanted to be a writer. Then in search of a stable career and financial independence, I found economics. For the longest time I believed that I had chosen one path over the other and that was it. That I had opened one door and shut another one, irrevocably. I was an economist and could no longer be a novelist. And now, here I am, mid-career, both an economist and a novelist.
Books have the power to shape, influence, and change our lives. Why is that so? What goes into a book that can shape lives? To address this we are interviewing people who can share a story about a book that changed their life, and why. As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lana Sabarwal.
Lana Sabarwal is a novelist, an economist, and a devoted Agatha Christie disciple. Her debut psychological mystery: Maya, Dead and Dreaming, will be out in June 2025. Her day job is in international development, where she writes about education and gender issues across the world. Her work has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times and covered by global media. She grew up in India and lives in Washington DC, but also within the pages of her favorite books.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory” and where you grew up?
Thank you for having me. This is such a pleasure.
I grew up in Delhi, India and had a typical middle-class upbringing. My father was a civil servant with a degree in economics. But was very interested in English literature. He loved these specific books that he had read in his youth: Jude the Obscure, Great Expectations, Anna Karenina. He’d be delighted when I’d read his favorites. I recall many a lovely evening spent dissecting Miss Havisham.
I wanted to be a writer. But he pushed me towards a more stable career. He didn’t have to push me hard. I realized that writing fiction was not a practical route to financial independence for a middle-class Indian girl. So, I chose Economics, just like my father. I came to the U.S. for a PhD in economics and settled into a very rewarding career in international development. Washington D.C. has been my home for years and years.
But now, mid-career, I am back exploring my love for fiction. And this part of my journey makes me think of my dad a lot. He passed away fourteen years ago. I wish I had had more time with him. I wish I had asked him more questions. Why these particular books? How did you find them? Why didn’t you go exploring further? I wish he could have been here, to see my first novel coming out !!
Let’s talk about your forthcoming book, Maya, Dead and Dreaming. How do you conceive of the story behind this book?
I love gossip. I love dishing it, receiving it, and just being around it. I even love gossip when it’s about people I don’t know.
But gossip has such an ugly and degraded reputation. For years, I have carried my love for gossip as a guilty secret. As evidence of bad behavior that I needed to be reformed from.
In 2019 I read a fascinating paper by my favorite economist, Abhijit Banerjee. In it he shows how people who are good at gossip can be the most effective agents for spreading useful information in a community. It really transformed the way I thought about gossip and about our relationship with it. I started to think about all the ways in which gossip is useful, especially for women living within constrained circumstances.
All this reflection took the shape of a story. A story about murder. How gossip can help solve a murder.
The idea of writing a murder mystery with this theme was particularly enticing because I had been feeling let down by the newer mysteries. I wanted to create a world very reminiscent of Agatha Christie — and within it tell the tale of gossip and murder.
Which three character traits do you think have been most instrumental to your work?
- Persistence — just the pushing of oneself up a steep hill to get to the mountain top that is a finished novel.
- Curiosity — about people and their complex, irrational, and gray desires and motivations.
- Mischief — this inclination to engage with the reader in a fun game of cat and mouse.
What’s the inspiration behind your work?
As I mentioned before, the catalyst for my novel is my love for gossip and Agatha Christie. But deeper than that, it’s the stories women tell. And how they tell them. How they talk to each other, in pairs and in circles.
As a young girl, I would sit around with aunties and listen to them talk. Even at that age, I could tell how cleverly these stories were structured and narrated. It was all so subtly self-serving and heavy with unspoken meaning. The conversation was so much deeper and richer than the words being said. There was tremendous material in the implications, the tone, the timing, the inflection.
On the surface, it would be something mundane. An auntie talking about her daughter-in-law’s habits or commenting about a neighbor’s evening walks. But every sentence was rich with nuance and innuendo. And then after so much talk, she would conclude dismissively, “Well what does it matter to me? I am much too busy to care about these things. And you know, I abhor drama.”
Fundamentally, we are all such unreliable narrators of our lives. I wanted to explore this through a story. Aside from Agatha Christie, the writers who inspired me the most are Iris Murdoch and Virginia Woolf. I was deeply inspired by the way they translate our complex inner lives to the page.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I can think of several people. Those who were inspiring or helpful or encouraging. But the person who had the most to do with getting me to this point is my darling husband, Saket.
Back in 2021, I was really struggling. I started my novel, but progress was slow. The demands from my day job were so overwhelming that both my time and inspiration ran dry. I almost gave up at that point.
Saket got me out of that funk. He helped me take a few days off and encouraged me to just think about what I needed to get my mojo back. Then, he helped find a small cottage by the water about 90 minutes from where we live. He took me there to get me out of my funk. It became my writing place.
Finding a calm space away to write was a game changer. He would take me there most weekends, so I could finish the novel. It was just the thing I needed. I could not have done it without him. It was my own version of Virginia Woolf’s a room of one’s own (by the water).
Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Can you please tell our readers about “The Book That Changed Your Life”?
I have mentioned several authors so far. The book that changed my life doesn’t come from any of them. It’s The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.
I read this book when I was twenty-three and it shook me. The way the heroine was sketched out, the way she evolved, her decisions, her dance between freedom and constraint.
The biggest thing was how Henry James painted Isabel Archer’s interior life; it was mind blowing to me. How she thought, felt, and most of all, how she rationalized her choices. He’s not so much telling you what’s happening as inviting you into the minds of his characters. Something lit inside me. I wanted to create a character, a rich and complex character, and then explore them on the page alongside the reader.
Can you describe a moment or share a story about how “the book that changed your life” inspired you to make big changes in your life?
I re-read Portrait of a Lady in April 2020, right at the beginning of the COVID panic. Everything was upside down and we were all contemplating our lives in a new way.
I had lived responsibly. Done my duty. Had the family, bought the house, built a respectable 9 to 5 career. But something was missing. I had picked a path for financial freedom and now I had freedom. Perhaps not all of it, but some of it. What was I doing with it?
Reading about Isabel Archer, this headstrong, curious woman who turns down marriage proposals, inherits a fortune, and insists on making her own path, it shook me awake. Isabel wasn’t perfect. She made choices that hurt her. But they were hers. Her insistence on freedom, even when it came at great personal cost, lit something in me.
And I decided to honor the dreams of the 17-year-old who had forced herself to pick economics for financial security. I opened a word document and started writing. My life didn’t transform into some cinematic reawakening, but it did start to feel like something I was authoring.
My favorite lines from the book are:
“I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.”
“So as to do them?”
“So as to choose.”
Can you articulate why you think books have the power to create movements, trends, and change?
There is this quote from Roger Ebert, movies are empathy machines. Well, so are books. In fact, they are the OG empathy machines. This is what gives them their power. They make you see yourself, and others, as you may never have done before.
A book has many aspects, of course. For example, you have the writing style, the narrative tense, the topic, the genre, the design, the cover, etc. In your opinion, what are the main, essential ingredients needed to create a book that have the power to impact lives?
Truth. Unflinching, unrelenting truth about who we are.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Career” and why?
1. Your job doesn’t have to define you.
As a teen, I wanted to be a writer. Then in search of a stable career and financial independence, I found economics. For the longest time I believed that I had chosen one path over the other and that was it. That I had opened one door and shut another one, irrevocably. I was an economist and could no longer be a novelist. And now, here I am, mid-career, both an economist and a novelist.
2. The hardest part is getting started. Once you get started, it all falls into place.
This happened with my novel. For over a year, I kept thinking about writing a novel. But all the thinking, or rather, overthinking got me nowhere. I would keep spooking myself out with endless what-ifs and how-will-Is. And then one day, I just started writing. Simply opened my computer and created a word document called. Believe me, it all fell into place — one step at a time.
3. Be kind to yourself. And others.
I have struggled with a harsh inner critic all my life. That mean voice that constantly puts you down. It was only in my early thirties that I decided to really tackle this inner critic. I realized I was not alone and there are proven strategies to address this. I wish I had known this sooner. Taming my inner critic made me so much happier. And kinder, to myself and others.
4. The beauty of failing fast.
This is an accepted philosophy in business and entrepreneurship. It also holds for writing. Instead of trying to conceive the perfect outline or character sketches or plot structures, encourage yourself to dive in and experiment. You can only incubate and plan for so long. Too much analysis and perfectionism will cause paralysis. Sometimes you just have to take a flight, test ideas, and allow yourself to fail. Each failure will teach you a lot and bring you closer to the final answer. This shift in mindset helped me get out of many writing blocks.
5. Give yourself a break. I don’t think this requires much explanation.
The world, of course, needs progress in many areas. What movement do you hope someone (or you!) starts next? Can you explain why that is so important?
A movement around discernment. A cultural shift that helps us become more thoughtful about information, that helps us filter truth from noise, wisdom from hype.
I can see the beginnings of it. A building-up of this collective desire to fight back against misinformation and polarization. To move towards long-form reading and deep conversations. Moving away from bite-sized social media driven hype cycles. To build more media literacy and critical thinking in the next generation. But we have a long way to go!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
My website is www.lanasabarwal.com
Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. We know that it will make a tremendous difference and impact thousands of lives. We are excited to connect further, and we wish you so much joy in your next success.
Lana Sabarwal On The Book That Changed Her Life was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.