Right now, I'm reading Baldwin: A Love Story. This is Nicholas Boggs's upcoming mammoth biography of James Baldwin. It's smart and lush and part of one of my favorite subsets of books: biographies and memoirs set in midcentury New York City. If I had to live during any time in the past, it would probably be then. 

Once, after reading Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues" in grad school, I went to a bar to wait for a boyfriend and ordered a Scotch and milk, which is what one of the characters in that piece is always drinking. It was such a retro drink, and it made me think of that time in New York. Unfortunately, I ordered it at an old Irish sports bar on 6th Avenue and Flatbush in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The bartender laughed, went to the end of the bar and opened an ancient minifridge whose door was covered in some kind of gray lint, poured half a carton of coffee creamer into a glass, and filled the rest to the top with Scotch. I couldn't not drink it, but after I choked it down and the bartender again laughed at me alongside the then-boyfriend, I did some more research on the drink when I got home and found out it was only popular with alcoholics in 1950s New York because it (allegedly) allowed you to soothe a stomach ulcer while also getting wasted.

'A Closer Read' is a toast to the curiosity and literary joys that might lead you to order one, in a dark and musty bar, to try and get closer to what you read and loved on a page.

"I was dreading a conversation that was just going to be about a mother and a daughter," Arundhati Roy says to me. 

I'm talking to her on a Monday morning. At least, that's the time it is for me. She is in Delhi, at night. It feels fitting that she's a day ahead; so much of her writing—both her fiction, like The God of Small Things, and her nonfiction, like Capitalism: A Ghost Story—seems to come from a timeline just before ours. 

Roy's latest book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is a memoir. It starts as an account of her fraught relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, always called Mrs. Roy in the book. Mrs. Roy was an educator and activist in her own right, a champion of women's rights who managed to start a co-educational school in Kerala over 50 years ago, with very little backing. It became a local institution and still runs today. Mrs. Roy was a trailblazer and a lifesaver for countless women and children. She was also horribly abusive. The book is a reckoning of these two facts, but it also manages to trace a history of modern India: how a multiracial, multiethnic, religiously diverse democracy became a political system dominated by repression and Hindu nationalism. It's a feat of memoir writing. 

I am making it sound sad or maybe "harrowing," that favorite adjective of book blurbs, but it's not any of those things; it feels as alive as watching a sudden dust storm from your architecture-dorm-room window while high off hashish, as Roy lovingly describes early on in the book. 

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Your book is pretty frank about the emotional effects of childhood abuse. How do you write through that emotional repression that a lot of people come up against when they're trying to narrate something bad that has happened to them?

Arundhati Roy: Even as a very young child, even when the violence was being directed at me, I could for some reason see the context in which it was happening. I could also see my mother being abused and isolated, what she was fighting against. There was a schism in me where there was one part of me that was ignoring it, but there was another part of me that was watching it, you know? 

I was constantly seeing things from [my mother's] point of view, and somehow as I grew, I could see that the battles that she was fighting, even if I was collateral, it was also making space for me as a woman in a society like this. So it was always more ambiguous for me than, let's say, for my brother.

I felt it so physically when she died. My brother, he just couldn't understand. "Why are you so upset?" His feelings were clearer than mine. But you have to structure yourself in a certain way to deal with something like that. I become this labyrinth of underground passageways. Then you've grown up in that peculiar shape because of this person. And then suddenly that person is not there and there's no reason for you to be that shape. And it causes a great amount of distress. Because it's simpler if somebody was cruel or abusive and you hated them and you left. But it's not like that with my mother. There was no single emotion about any one single thing.

KG: You have a really thought-provoking line in the book that says, "Radical kindness is politics by any other means."

AR: It was in reference to Mrs. Roy and how she functioned there. She was not at all this do-gooding sort of NGO kind of feminist. She would hear about something happening, and she would just march into the hospital or to the court, and she would not try to sympathize and stroke someone's back and say, "Oh my God, how terrible for you." She would just say, "Look, you want out of this? Come, I'll show you a way." And if that person was not up to it, she would drop it. She expected everybody to show some steel.

Maybe she was impatient about it, but I thought that was politics by other means. It was in this very male-centered world saying, "Okay, something terrible happened to us, but that's not what has to define us. Let's become beautiful. Let's do something great." And to me, that's really important. 

How can you take something and then turn it into … I mean, in her case, she didn't turn it into art. She turned it into something else. It's like jazz. What a beautiful thing. Turn it into something no one can look away from. Because none of us can expect that any kind of revolution will come out of asking people to feel sorry for us.

KG: Do you believe a writer needs a nation? Or if not a nation, does a writer need a community?

AR: Well, I think a writer with a nation might be a sad thing. I remember somewhere in one of my essays, I said that flags are bits of colored cloth that they use to shrink-wrap your brains and then [to make] shrouds to bury you when you're dead. 

But I do feel that maybe you need to have a river valley or a forest or a mountain or something. In India, we are a nation of communities with hard-bound drawn boundaries of caste and religion and ethnicity. And as you can tell from this book, as well as all my books, I am on the edge of all that. I don't fully agree with this dreamy-eyed valorization of community, because if you live in a traditional community, as I did as a girl growing up in Kerala, there's plenty to be angry about. There was nothing I wanted more than to escape.

KG: There's a part in the book, I think it's when you're first experiencing initial backlash after you won the Booker Prize. You write something like, "I wouldn't leave India. This place is as much mine." 

AR: It's just a playground that a writer is in and understands. And I can sit on the street and I can read it. I can't do that in any other place.

KG: One of the really frustrating things about being a writer here in the U.S., ever since Obama was elected, is there's an argument here that I think a lot of American artists have bought into, which is that we can somehow reclaim "being American." We can just focus on the supposed good parts of it.

AR: It always involves exclusion. Because who is the real American? That has to be defined against someone who is not. 

Everything that you're seeing in the U.S. today, whether it's the attack on universities, whether it's the questioning of citizenship, whether it's the weaponization of race—in our case, caste—all of it we have seen already in India. And it hasn't gone away. It has been institutionalized. And we are living in a sewer of moral rot right now.

KG: Definitely. For me, as a Black writer, so much is written about Black joy, Black community, Black whatever, and it just feels so hollow at this particular moment. And nobody seems to be able to move forward with language about what we're leaving out about this moment. You know?

AR: I mean, in India, even in the streets of Delhi, we have watched Muslims being lynched. We have heard the calls for rape. We have watched mosques being demolished. We have watched mass killing. We have watched a person who was chief minister when thousands of Muslims were lynched and killed become the prime minister. And we watched all that.

India was a friend of Palestine. Today, protests in favor of Palestine are banned. You can't say anything. You get arrested. And it's not as if people want to say anything. Nobody wants to say anything, even though people who are beaten down are not saying anything about Palestine. 

So it's a terrifying time here, and it's a terrifying time there in the United States, as we all know. I appreciate the people who come out on the streets and protest [in the U.S.], because here, even that's not happening.

KG: That brings me to another question that I had while reading the book. You write about organizing with groups and people who you do not 100 percent ideologically align with. 

AR: What I find is that people who are actually on the ground, whether it's in the forests of Bandika area with the guerillas who I walked with, whether it's in Kashmir, whether it's the anti-caste movement—people who are on the ground actually doing the fighting are much more tolerant than the ones who are doing the talking.

There's great capital to be made from mining these differences by the people who would like us all to squabble and fight and beat each other down while they go about their business. And I think to recognize the largest structure of this machine that we are all up against requires a certain amount of understanding that there will never be a time in the world—never, never, never—when everybody agrees about everything. And we should be able to celebrate those differences rather than hammer each other into the ground.

And also be a little forgiving, because everyone comes out of conditioning of some kind. Everyone makes mistakes. But if we hammer people into the ground, we'll all be isolated. And that's exactly what the people who are increasingly smaller and smaller numbers who control everything, from information to wealth, to resources, to everything—that's what they want.

For 'A Closer Read', we will ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week's writer is the poet and novelist Phillip B Williams, whose latest book is a gorgeous novel, Ours, about love and freedom in a 19th-century community of people who escaped slavery.

From Phillip: "Outside my apartment in Leipzig, Germany, teases a park that within it has a botanical garden. I know it is now summer by the absence of mating calls from morning birds. I write by typing, so sitting in nature isn't ideal for me. That's why having this view is helpful. Also, it helps to crack the window open because there is no AC here, but we do get a nice breeze (and the occasional hornet). If I do get restless, about a third of a mile into the park is a patch of roses and lavender that perfumes a circular path. I can loop around and walk back home after I've had my fill."