Reading a narrative written in first-person often lends to you the empathetic eyes of a narrator even when they are flawed—making the experience of reading a story more immersive. The writer’s ‘I’ becomes your ‘I’ and the result is a deeper understanding of the complexity of human conditions. Writer and Filmmaker Alina Gufran’s debut novel, No Place to Call My Own, delves into the intricate complexities of navigating life as a young Muslim woman in contemporary India through such a first-person narrative.
As I enter into Gufran’s home for the interview, we sit down for a chat on her book and her life. The first thing that both of us agreed on was the shortage of first-person narratives by female authors in India. Although, now we see that changing, Gufran wanted to let her readers experience the state of a normal imperfect woman’s psyche by her own narration. In her own words, she encapsulates—‘whether it’s grappling with dating apps, being ghosted, having a fight with your mum or getting to know that your father is cheating; what happens when a Muslim woman thrives or makes a mistake or just goes binge drinking? And how all of it condenses into your psyche’. Her vision of ‘women telling women’s stories’ is also reflected in her films. Her recent short film, Leela, that went to 2023’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, embraces the female friendship of two young women in a village in Goa.
In this conversation, she shares insights into her writing process, her motivations for exploring the female experience and the cinematic influences that inform her storytelling.
How did you get the idea of crafting a novel about a young woman’s life in our contemporary times?
It’s difficult to answer this question because I don’t think the idea presented itself to me at any singular moment. It was more a result of external circumstances. When the pandemic happened and the industry shut down in Bombay, I was working in film. I’d lost my source of income, and I was sitting at home just like everybody else in the country. I began documenting everything that was happening at that moment. It almost turned into a journal of sorts—less reflexive and more with the lens turned outwards. Then, as I was writing that, a character started emerging. And I thought it’d be so interesting to take stock of this character’s coming-of-age journey. So, the book’s structure currently follows this narrator in first person.
The character is what took hold of me. The further I plumbed into the depths of her psyche, trying to understand her motivations—what it means to be in your twenties, growing up in India in the early s to now, against the backdrop of the MeToo movement, the pandemic, and the financial realities of being an artist—the more the story presented itself to me.
What is your writing process?
It’s funny because a lot of people have been asking me this in the recent past, and nobody’s asked me this before the book got picked up. The reason I point that out is because I feel the way you live your day translates into the work. I have to exist in monotony and have enough space for nothingness and boredom to emerge, which is why the pandemic became critical for me to be able to write the story.
I think the routine is quite contradictory because it’ll be like five days of writing, eight hours a day, just subsisting on coffee and barely eating, and then three days of not touching your laptop and being repulsed with the work, before repeating the cycle. I think a couple of things that really help, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before, are physical movement, meditation, and solitude. Reading a lot, I think reading really helps and of course, films. But if I can just arrange my life so that I am close to any and all art that inspires me, it automatically translates to the page.
What attracted you to explore the internal dialogue of a woman and detaching from the conventional style of storytelling?
The kind of literature I grew up reading was very much mediated by what society believes is ‘good literature’ or what is determined as the ‘canon’. It’s usually just a man contending with the city or a lover or himself—everything is kind of seen through his eyes, the lens is turned outwards, and the voice is quite authoritative. Reading women such as Clarice Lispector, Mary Gaitskill, Annie Ernaux answers so many of my own questions about being a woman moving through the world.
I also derive a lot from Latin American writers like [Julio] Corta?zar and [Jorge Luis] Borges, etc. The story becomes an outcome of the character’s journey, not the other way around. It’s not like I’m taking the character and making them fit into situations; it’s more about understanding the character deeply and then understanding why they may or may not act a certain way. Another thing that excites me is this idea of unreliable narration, where, just on a craft level, it allows me to play with the reader’s expectations and subvert certain existing narratives.
People have very stark opinions on a woman-centric narrative. Why do you think that happens?
When Olivia Lang writes about a city, it’s considered a woman’s perspective on a city. When someone like Ben Lerner writes, it becomes Ben Lerner’s take on a place. We all know why this distinction exists, but for me to even look at it, a ‘woman-centric narrative’ seems like something that would concern marketers rather than writers or readers.
The belief is that a woman is meant to have it all together; we are just meant to rise to the occasion, but that’s so often not the case. Internally, we’re all questioning it constantly. I think that’s what the novel is about, the narrator is just interrogating her place in the world and what is expected of her, and she’s unapologetic about it. This burden of having to present a likeable narrator is something I can’t wrap my head around because I don’t think literature is the realm for politeness.
Since the novel is inspired from your lived experiences, did writing this novel bring a change in your sense of self somehow?
This is a question I ask myself every day, actually. Until the book got picked up, I had no cognisance of the fact that being an author comes with a public perception that writing the work is not enough. You have to be out in the world talking about the work, which is a privilege, but most writers do tend to be reclusive, and I think we’re happiest when we’re left to our devices, it’s still quite a privilege to be out here talking about your work. But there is a cognitive dissonance for me, wherein I do feel I’m inhabiting these two worlds simultaneously, which eerily mirrors a lot of what Sophia’s character goes through. Her parents are Hindu-Muslim; she is an artist, but she also holds a job. She’s a girlfriend, but she also has affairs. She has an abortion, and then she wants to have a child again.
I don’t think that writing is inherently therapeutic. I feel that it can often even backfire because you start reverse engineering certain situations in your life just so they can inform your work. That being said, writing a novel allowed me to take stock of the world and kind of just sit with things, a difficult proposition given the pace at which everything moves. The very act of sitting and writing becomes a sort of rebellion.
I wouldn’t say that writing this novel has untangled many emotional knots in me, but I think there has been a deeper acceptance of my sense of self. As much as the novel was an interrogation into the self, I feel like I’ve finally come to a deeper acceptance of whoever I might be and how that might fluctuate from time to time.
Does filmmaking influenced your writing process in any way or vice-versa?
The filmmaking process has influenced my prose to an unbelievable degree. I always wrote prose but it was very hidden from the public eye. I formally studied filmmaking, which meant my work was being critiqued. So, the learning process was much faster. A couple of things, just from a craft perspective that I have taken from screenwriting and editing into my prose are the language of a film and the ear of a story. Something as basic as being able to tell the story in the white spaces or the subtext of the story or how the plot moves forward through the scene work or through what is not happening or what’s happening off the page, as opposed to what is being said. And another thing is being able to switch between perspectives, which sounds so simplistic but when you’re editing or when you’re writing a script and shooting, you have to learn how to switch between perspectives in order to paint a picture. Being able to build a scene, to observe visual imagery, all of that has played an essential role. I think I would be a very different kind of writer if I hadn’t turned to film first in some way.
Words Paridhi Badgotri
Date 04.03.2025