Please talk about your approach to determining how a story will end.Ī: Stories end when they are working to the best of my ability. Q: The stories in Interpreter of Maladies generally end without a resolution. Every so often I would come across it, thinking it might make a good title, but the story didn’t materialize for another five years or so. It lingered long enough for me to jot the phrase down on a piece of paper. As I walked back home the phrase “interpreter of maladies” popped into my head as a way of describing what this person was doing. We stopped to chat, and he told me he was working in a doctor’s office, translating on behalf of the doctor’s many Russian patients. One day I crossed paths with an acquaintance of Armenian descent who had kindly helped me move, some time before, into one of my many Boston apartments. At first it was simply a phrase that came to me during my graduate school years in Boston. This title was born before I even knew what the story would be about. “Interpreter of Maladies” was an exception. Q: The titles of your stories are spare yet weighty, especially “Interpreter of Maladies.” Can you tell us a bit about how you came up with that title?Ī: Usually titles don’t emerge until I’m well underway with a story, and sometimes I finish something and still have to search for a title.
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