Episode Summary

What happens when you lose a friend who felt like a soulmate?

In this episode of How You Find Your Voice, Jessie Huth speaks with novelist and Harvard professor, Tara Menon, about her brilliant debut novel, Under Water. It's a moving and beautifully written book exploring the themes of friendship, loss and the natural world.

Set between two approaching storms, the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Sandy in New York, the novel explores the aftermath of losing a friend, and the ways memory, grief and trauma shape how we move through the world.

Tara reflects on the absence of language around friendship grief, the influence of literary traditions from Tennyson to the flâneur novel, and the challenge of writing fiction after a career spent analysing it.

Together they explore ecological loss, the emotional resonance of the sea, and what it means to let go of control in the creative process.

This is a conversation about grief, memory, observation and the long process of finding your voice.

Topics Covered

Grief and the loss of a close friend
The absence of language around friendship grief
Dual timelines and writing towards catastrophe
The 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Sandy
Memory, trauma and how they shape perception
The natural world, coral reefs and ecological grief
Writing the sea and underwater environments
Manta rays and animal behaviour
Greek mythology and literary references
Male entitlement and the experience of women in cities
Tourism, colonialism and exploitation
Moving from literary criticism to fiction writing
Letting go of control in the creative process
Finding your voice as a writer

About Tara Menon

Tara Menon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Nation, Paris Review and Public Books, where she co-edits the Literary Fiction section. Tara was born in India, grew up in Singapore, spent a decade in New York, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can read more about Tara Menon and Under Water here.

About the Podcast

How You Find Your Voice is the podcast that asks brilliant guests, mostly women, how they found or reclaimed their voices.

Through conversations with writers, activists, artists, thinkers and entrepreneurs, we explore the work they have made, the lives they have lived and the inner transformations that made it possible.

We talk about turning points and resistance, doubt and silence, creative risk and process, as well as the messy business of becoming.

Listen and Follow

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You can also follow How You Find Your Voice on Substack for longer reflections on voice, creativity and the ideas behind the podcast, or on Instagram for updates.

Keywords

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