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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. All week long, we've been bringing you our Takeaway Holiday Book Club picks, and we've given you a few non-fiction titles. We thought it would be only appropriate to end this week with a novel.

Sarah Thankam Mathews: "I just want to say, I'm sorry I didn't tell you something important about me when you asked for it. I want to know what you wanted to tell me. Okay? Between us, there was a quiet, equal parts comforting and combative. I readied myself to speak. Found myself unable to. To talk about my uncle and what he had done to me, about my family coming here and having to leave. It felt like too much. It was being asked to cough up one's own organs upon demand, lay them bloodied, strung with mucus, upon the tabletop. But Tig was waiting, and, I knew, comfortable with long silence. I could tell a part of it, the story of my family."

My name is Sarah Thankam Matthews, and my novel is, All This Could Be Different.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Sarah's debut novel, and it made several 2022 best-of-fiction book lists, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. I want to start by asking you about writing. What draws you to it?

Sarah Thankam Mathews: I think I've always been drawn to it, to language and to stories. I grew up a pretty quiet, inward, young person in a part of the world that many people in countries like this and in the West don't even think about. I grew up in Muscat, Oman. It was so apparent to me that books and stories were portals to worlds and people that I had never seen and met. I just always felt aware of that power. I think the moment that I wanted to be a writer happened in some way. When I was 14, I had somehow got my hands on a copy of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and it's interesting.

At that point in my life, I'd never met a white person nor a Black one. This book just rearranged my insights. It meant so much to me. I just had this deep feeling of, "Oh, I want to do some version of what was accomplished here," which was, I think that specific experience of breathing in a whole world, and people that are so different from your world and your people, and in that process, understanding what the author wants you to think about and care about. That's always been very powerful to me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Surely, this must be in part what makes you a writer. I often tell the story that I came to college to be an English major, thinking that I would become a novelist, become a writer, and then reading Morrison and realizing, "Oh no, I am not capable of doing that." [laughs] I love that you read Morrison and you were like, "Oh yes, let's do that."

Sarah Thankam Mathews: To be clear, very much felt like a horizon versus something to emulate directly. Yes, I just think that I too really felt this sense of being in the presence of greatness. I also thought there was a gap for me between that experience and thinking about being a Writer and that gap took off more than 10 years. What I knew I wanted to do in that moment was write stories. I was really comfortable with the stories being only for myself. I just knew that I wanted to try to make language and make stories. I didn't really think about it in a professionalized context or I didn't even think about other people reading if that makes sense.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about the main character of this story--young, queer, and Indian immigrant. Tell us about Sneha.

Sarah Thankam Mathews: Yes, so my novel, All This Could Be Different, is more than anything a story of this one person, my protagonist, Sneha. Over time, the book zooms out a little bit and you see the world Sneha builds around her, and it ends up being this group portrait of young people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, forging community through love and struggle.

Sneha is interesting to me. I care very deeply about her. The basic facts is that she's an Indian immigrant. She has moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city where she knows nobody. Really, over the course of the book, she reckons with her first job, her first love with this magnetic white girl, ballet dancer, and maybe most importantly, her first real friends, who are most exemplified by these two characters, Tig, who is this genderqueer, Black Milwaukee native, and Tom, who is also a Wisconsin native and a straight white bro, but with real capacity for intellect and tenderness.

I think it's true, these people that Sneha comes of age, that Sneha forms her adult self and learns to reckon with the fact that she is someone who has been dealt a difficult hand, and that hand has made her, in some ways, prickly and prideful and aloof. She is kind of defiant about certain difficult things that have happened to her in the past. I think that she copes through compartmentalization and also through, in some ways, humor and a certain kind of defiance, that so much of the person we meet in the first 30 pages of the novel is a Sneha who is just really holding it all together through a really advanced compartmentalizing and a lack of honesty with herself, with really everybody in her life. Over the course of the novel, you watch her becoming and making a life and a home for herself, which involves among many other things, unlearning some of the things that she's learned to survive. [music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. We're going to take a quick pause, more with Sarah Thankam Matthews in just a moment.

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I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're back, talking with Sarah Thankam Matthews, about her debut novel, All This Could Be Different. It's our final Takeaway Holiday Book Club pick. This is, in many ways, a book about Milwaukee as well.

Sarah Thankam Mathews: I think there are a couple of pieces to it. One is simply that I was in Milwaukee right after I left college and working my first job and falling in love and living some parts of that particular time, the year of 2013, 2014, which was a very specific time in American political history, economic history. I felt like I could finally maybe summon the perspective to revisit my relationship to Milwaukee, that place has for me, and I really just add a level of instinct. Did not feel that interested in writing this novel set on the East Coast where I live. I knew I didn't want it to be in some big sexy, splashy city, where at least as the large majority of our country is literature and culture and media, tell us that certain big coastal cities are the only places where things happen.

Throughout the book, I think you see flashes of a defiant attitude towards that. This idea that actually places like Milwaukee are places where things happened and have happened. The final reason for why I chose Milwaukee is I wanted a certain kind of mirroring between these young people working and struggling and coming in a very ordinary person way to the conclusion that so much of how society is set up does not work for them and trying to find a different way.

I wanted that to mirror something that happened historically, which is that, for 40 years, Milwaukee was governed by these socialist mayors. They were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and they really embarked on these programs to make working people's lives better. I just felt really interested by that. Ultimately, in some ways, I wanted to write a book that sure is sad and sexy, and I think deals with the pain of being young, which I think is a very real pain across all generations and certainly within mine. I also wanted to write a book that maybe ultimately pointed towards hope, and Milwaukee seemed like a good place for that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Giving advice to young people, especially those whom you do not actually know is pretty tough, but I feel like I can't have someone whose debut novel was a National Book Award finalist without asking if you have advice for young writers.

Sarah Thankam Mathews: What I often want to say to young writers, most of all the young writer that I was is play the long game, work, assuming you have many books in you, pay attention to your emotional need, to what fuels your actual desire around self-expression or a certain kind of visibility of your stories and your thoughts and yourself. I think it's good to be an honest and diligent caretaker of your creative life.

Don't try to microwave success, and do try to be decent to other people and move with integrity. I came up at a time when everyone, and it's still true. The publishing industry really does venerate and idolize youth, especially for women or femme readers, and I just keep coming back to there's no substitute for experience and there never has been.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Sarah Thankam Matthews, author of All This Could Be Different. Thank you for joining The Takeaway today.

Sarah Thankam Mathews: Thank you for having me.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: We wanted to hear from you about what books captivated you in 2022.

Nancy: Hi. I'm Nancy, calling from Alpine, New Jersey. My favorite book this year is The Listening Tree by Kathryn Randall. It's a science fiction fantasy about middle school kids who travel through time in an old tree to save the future environmental crisis.

JP: JP in Eden, Utah. My favorite book this year was Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never. It gave me hope that we can reach a safe, carbon-free energy future through nuclear power.

Susan: My name is Susan. I'm calling from Salem, Oregon. My favorite book this year is Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy. She writes about an alternative approach to drug use where users are supported instead of being shamed.

Russell Oden: My name is Russell Oden. I'm from Wilmington, Delaware, and my favorite book this year is The Return of the Christmas Witch by Aubrey Plaza and Dan Murphy. It's a charming tale of Santa's twin sister.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you all for the fantastic book recommendations, and, as always, thanks for calling into The Takeaway. Now, I also checked in with Team Takeaway, to see what was on their 2022 reading lists, starting with our very own book, Connoisseur.

Shanta Covington: Hey, this is Shanta Covington, Senior Producer for The Takeaway. Some of my favorites on the non-fiction side--Community as Rebellion by Lorgia García Peña, Black Country Music by Francesca Royster, and Jemele Hill's Uphill: A Memoir.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Escapism and fantasy were core themes among the team's book selections, like Executive Producer Lindsay Foster Thomas's pick.

Lindsay Foster Thomas: I picked up Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. It's about a woman who is deeply convinced that she is turning into a dog.

Jackie Martin: Hi. I'm Jackie Martin, Line Producer here for The Takeaway, and I couldn't tell you what my favorite book I read this year was, but my daughter did just buy me Fire & Blood by George R. R. Martin, and I needed a little escapism, so it's nice to be back in the Westerosi atmosphere, so I'm really enjoying that.

Morgan Givens: I'm Morgan Givens, an Associate Producer here at The Takeaway, and my book of the year is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, and I got two words for you--intergalactic, necromancy. [chuckles] It sounds wild. It's a fantastic story, political intrigue, lots of action. Her world building is just wildly good.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It wasn't just about far-off galaxies. Associate Producer Mary Steffenhagen's pick left her grappling with tough questions about our world.

Mary Steffenhagen: My book of the year wasn't published this year, but I read it this year, and I still think about it. It's Matrix by Lauren Groff. It's a historical novel about Marie de France, a 12th-century poet. She works her way up from poverty to run a large convent, but this is not a girl boss story. It gets dark, and it asks, can a person be both great and good?

Melissa Harris-Perry: A standout passage from producer Ryan Wilde's favorite book was even the inspiration for some new ink.

Ryan Wilde: "They live mostly on mice and insects. When they are lucky or clever enough to come up with something bigger, they are overcome with joy and love for one another. They rhapsodize. They harmonize their loneliness and sorrow, and they don't care who likes it."

This passage is about a coyote from the novel The Meadow by James Galvin. I liked it so much. I actually got a tattoo of a coyote this year.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The Takeaway Library is now closed.

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