Sarah Thankam Mathews

“All This Could Be Different is an extraordinary novel, spiny and delicate, scathingly funny and wildly moving. Sarah Thankam Mathews is a brilliant writer, one whose every ringing sentence holds both bite and heart.” —Lauren Groff, author of Matrix From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all. A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.

A Novel

All This Could Be Different

tiff <3

This is my tragedy and my great good fortune, to be the recipient of this bond, to be kept alive under its crushing warmth and weight, obe given it so freely, so much more than I have ever deserved.

The world has ended a thousand times and my name called in each new book of it.

ayoni

On my phone I read an article about how, in certain cultures, there are no separate words for the color green and the color blue, and if you showed someone a grass-hued paint swatch next to one the color of summer sky, they would say these were the same. Different shades of one thing.

This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man's hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and mother-hood.

I did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

It made things simple, though. As lies can.

On the door's other side: the woman I wanted, the woman I could not say things to expressly because of that want. The hot water drilled down in mercy. I closed my eyes. Like a child I imagined the world gone dark, everyone vanished, and myself safe.

These were the frames I could choose between, the choices I had.

Sometimes green and blue collapse. Indistinct. Smudge into sameness.

But nobody consoles you after a rupture with a beloved friend. There are few movies ideal for watching while your tears salt pints of ice cream, no articles in women's magazines that you can skim at the hairdressers You have only the ache. No script to accompany it. No ritual to give it shape.

All this, the very facts of who I was, could be different. I could be a person refigured: warm, charming, loving, loved.

To return to the new place makes it less new, moves it something closer to comfort, to safety.

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