Zibby Publishing author alert! Zibby chats with debut author Nanda Reddy about A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL, a riveting and redemptive story of a young Guyanese trafficking victim and her journey to build and protect her life in the United States. Nanda shares how her personal experiences as an immigrant shaped this narrative, and then talks about her protagonist, who has hidden her past from her family for decades—until her sister’s reappearance forces her to confront the truth. She also talks about the novel’s portrayal of a deaf sibling and then delves into its themes of immigration, code-switching, identity, trauma, and resilience.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Nanda, thanks for coming on Totally Booked to talk about A Girl Within A Girl. Congratulations. 

Nanda: Thanks for having me. 

Zibby: Of course, as we both know, this is a book that we are publishing at Zippy Publishing. And so I had the great honor of reading very early draft, the earliest, I don't know what draft that was that you sent in, to now where it's all polished and ready to go.

Tell listeners about what A Girl Within A Girl is about. Give us the rundown. 

Nanda: The elevator pitch is that it's about a woman who hides her identity from her husband and her family and she has to come clean when her sister finds her, and readers learn that she arrived to the country without papers, and that she changed her identity multiple times to survive a really difficult childhood.

So the story interweaves the present day with the past, heavily on the past, so that readers understand why she was forced to change her identity, or felt forced to change her identity. 

Zibby: And this is your debut novel. 

Nanda: It is. It's so exciting. It is, but it's not like the first thing I've ever written of course, because all writers, we have these shelved novels before one of them feels good enough.

Zibby: So how, at this point in your life, why did you decide to write this book, and how did you come up with this particular idea? 

Nanda: I've talked about this I, with Cory, actually, when we were on the BuzzBooks panel, that inspiration for this specific novel arrived in, in an aha moment. I was on vacation with my family in Costa Rica, and a tour guide just made the honest assumption, this happens fairly often, that I'm, I was from India, and yeah, I didn't correct him, just because it didn't really matter in the moment, and it doesn't really bother me, and I am of Indian descent, but I thought of a the story popped in my head, a woman who hides her identity, lets people's assumptions shape what she presents to the world, and I knew in the moment that she would I don't know, take on multiple identities. I don't know.

That's how the story arrived and it rattled in my head for a while before I actually wrote it. 

Zibby: I love that. The rattling. How all novels get built, the required rattling. Take us a little bit more through some of the identities because this book spans continents and cities and all sorts of different perspectives and has so much to offer.

A lot of trauma built into it. Take us through even the geography of the book. 

Nanda: So the story at first you meet Maya and she is an adult woman with two boys and a husband and a family life that seems perfect. And her husband, she gets this letter from her sister and she knows that it's time to come clean.

Because her sister is sick. She has breast cancer. And so you go back. You go back to Guyana. The first part of the novel is set in Guyana and you meet Maya as 12 year old Sunny on the day that her life changes. She is very close to her deaf older sister who she's served as like a interpreter for her whole life.

And you meet her family. You get a sense of the setting, like what Guyana's like for a, gosh, a working class, quote unquote family in that in the eighties at that time, what a home would look like and what their lives might look like. And and you also get a sense of the kind of desperation people felt at that time to leave Guyana.

Guyana was a very, a new democracy at that time. It was. 15 years old, it had just gotten its independence from Britain in the late 60s. And it's, yeah, so it, people had this at the time, there was a lot of upheaval in the country and there was a desperation to leave and so massive amounts of people left and a lot of them had family abroad in different places that sponsored them, which is how I arrived.

But if you didn't have that option a lot of people hired smugglers and or tried to I mean it was very expensive and in this situation with Sonny some sort of a gift or Landed in their family's lap in that the situation arose That seemed almost perfect to send her abroad and to get quote unquote a foot in the door.

So I, I wanted to capture that sense of just urgency that, that desperation people have to migrate for economic reasons and complicated reasons, because that's still going on today. That goes on all over. People, of course, migrate or are forced to leave for very tra traumatic, I Reasons like war, but a lot of people leave because of these economic forces and that desperation is something that I don't think people truly understand.

I was and it's, I don't know if I really captured it, but I was trying to capture that feeling of desperation that the family had because they're a loving family, but they end up sending Sunny on this journey and putting her in, in, in harm's way. And, that wasn't their intention, of course.

And then to continue, she moves to, she comes to, moves, she comes to Miami, and she's on this, she's at this flower farm where she is with two also undocumented Guyanese people who are abusive and are difficult personalities to they, they were, they're, But I wanted to paint them as real people because while they are not good, quote unquote, good people, they were also acting out of a lot of desperation, but the monster in the story is this guy that feels like he doesn't have a lot of control in his world because he doesn't have papers and he doesn't have Control in his jaw like job situation And so he exerts that control on the easiest victim like who is Sonny who arrives in his life and on his wife And I don't describe that process in his mind explicitly, but I hope it comes across in the way it was written and the way he speaks and what he says and how he behaves.

And so that people can understand how monsterish behavior kind of grows out of that, yeah, out of situations. And there are some hard things that happen in the novel, but I also wanted to show the light side of, quote unquote, light side of things. In that, when you.

When you immigrate to a new country there you're a fish out of water and so many things are just things that are like that are common every day just to someone here who's new to you. So just even like seeing a microwave or like having pizza for the first time or the differences in schools and music and TV shows.

There's a lot of the 80s built into the book because she moves here then. And I also moved into this country in the 80s. A lot of those things, like the pop music, the TV shows, and the foods, the zeitgeist of that time, was what I studied to assimilate. And she does the same thing. And there's a bit of that.

And then, of course she changes. And Sunny becomes She becomes Nina because they call her that from the get go. But then she chooses to become Nina because of a traumatic incident. And then later on, she chooses to become quote unquote Cindy to reinvent herself when she wants to free herself from all of the abuse and from the monster in the story.

And then she goes through a stint where she is a stripper, and she's Cynthia. And I don't show the, all the years between Cynthia and Maya. But you do understand why she becomes Maya, and when she becomes Maya. And there are flashback scenes to show how she grew into that identity as an adult.

Zibby: So it's almost like you had to write like four main characters, right? Because they're different ages, different places, different, obviously deep down, it's the same person. And that's the whole point of it. But you really had to do it. This is not a light lift. Let me put it that way. 

Nanda: No I did.

I, it was like writing four characters. But again, there's that thread of the one person that runs through all of it. And I hope, I hope it comes across that way. I feel like early readers have gotten it and it was, I never felt jarring to move from one identity to the next. It felt seamless.

Yeah. But it was a little bit like writing. 

Zibby: Yeah. And I certainly didn't mean to imply it didn't work. It worked very well. I was, it was supposed to be a compliment, tell me more about immigrating here in the 80s and even what in your own experience can inform some of the more painful writing in this book.

There was a, it felt very authentic. Like, where did this all come from? 

Nanda: I wanted, like I told you, the inspiration, but really I wanted to write a story about identity and especially with, As related to being an immigrant, there's, whenever anyone moves to a new country, and I'm sure it works the other way, too, but if When someone moves to America, there's this realization that so much of what you know and who you are is wrong, quote unquote wrong.

And to fit in, especially if you're moving at a formative time, like Sonny does, like I did, everything you've ever known, and the way you've behaved, the way you spoke, all of that is wrong. It doesn't fit in. It doesn't work. And you have to erase a lot of that and hide a lot of that. And so there is a lot of her wanting to fix her speech and like working on it and thinking about the right way to say things and and so you see her working through all of those issues and then learning eventually how to code switch, how to put on a new skin and embody some someone who's accepted, and to, and hide the part that isn't.

And there's also that sense of feeling like that is inferior. And I wanted that to come across in the way that language was her initial language when she first arrived was Perceived by the people around her and the way she saw it too, as inferior. I wanted to show that without actually making the language inferior.

Or come across that way on the page. What, I wanted to respect it. And, but then show how it was perceived. And that is actually, that's, from true, lived experience. And that, I, that even the scene where. someone corrects her when she says three, I said tree when I first came to America, that's how you said the number three, three.

And I remember I'm like, my whole body reddened when someone was like, it's not tree, it's three. And I don't think they meant it to be disparaging, or maybe they did. I actually, I do remember that moment. It was a cousin and they think they meant it to be mean , but it, that was that moment where I was like, I have to, I can't speak, I shouldn't speak.

I'm not allowed. I don't know how to speak. So I leaned into little experiences like that, that I had as someone who assimilated to write the book. And it's not like I, my mind it where I brainstormed a bunch of things. They just came out naturally because I was writing an immigrant, and although Sonny is not me, all of us novelists, we mine from our lives, and so there, there's a great amount of us that just gets imbued in the character, and yeah, like one of those examples.

Zibby: What about her sister being deaf? 

Nanda: Yes. Yeah, I didn't set out to write a deaf character or deaf characters. Again, when this story came to me, I didn't think about that. But as soon as I sat down to write it, she had a deaf sister. And, at first, in the back of my head, I thought, Is this a bad idea?

Because will people think this is my actual sister? And as I wrote it, and Roshi was nothing like my sister in the end. And yeah. I decided to keep it, but I thought, it's interesting. The representation, of course, was, matters, and it, since I have this experience, I can write it. But the things, like with her deaf sister in the beginning, when you meet her, she's feeling this desire to be separated from her, that she's grown tired of kind of always being attached to her, and they also have this.

It's a very rudimentary way of speaking to each other. That's all from lived experience when I was a kid. I was younger than my deaf sister, but I did serve as her interpreter, and I was actually placed up two grades to be her interpreter. And I felt attached to her in that way, not, but I think I really leaned into maybe small feelings I had and I made them huge in the novel.

And I, of course, fictionalized all of all of everything, but yeah, it's the mining, those small feelings, that, Or not, things we're proud of wanting to just ditch her, although I never really did. That, I think, makes the novel honest, because, it comes from those honest, ugly places, right?

Where you were, I wasn't a mean kid, but where you had a mean kid feeling. 

Zibby: And what's your relationship like with your sister now? 

Nanda: I, my sister is in Florida. She lives not too far from my parents, and I just saw her. She came here to visit for Christmas. We have a great relationship, but because she's hearing impaired, and I don't speak, and I'm not proud of this, I don't speak sign language fluently, it's very trans surface.

We can only go so deep in conversation, right? And so it's, I know how she's doing, she knows how I'm doing and that kind of thing, and I, and if she needs something. But I think with the whole deaf culture, what I wanted to do with this book was to portray a utopia that doesn't exist for most deaf families and for deaf people.

Because I thought, Why not, right? Sonny's having enough problems, it shows some good. In the 80s, particularly, there, there was a huge push to force deaf people to speak. So I remember when my, and of course my sister, she didn't have hearing aids in Guyana at all, and she didn't get them until she was 11 when she came to this country.

And she didn't actually start learning sign language until even later, 13 or 14. So she arrived to that language late, but there was, I remember she'd come home and she'd touch our throats because she's that's what they told us we have to do to learn to speak, like to feel the vibration and then try to mimic it.

And there was no push to try to get the families to learn sign language until it was like, maybe I was a senior or junior in high school and she was too and she's oh, they're doing this program And they want us but by then it felt too late. I think we're all so busy. My parents had two jobs and it wasn't so this the whole the idea of a whole family speaking sign language and making, it's not an effort, but making it a seamless part of their lives is a utopia that does not exist for most deaf kids.

They, like my sister, our circumstance was a little different that we arrived later and so she wasn't brought up here. But we didn't, my parents don't speak sign language. My other sister doesn't speak sign. We all tried. It's not like I don't know any words. I know the alphabet and I can sign.

But I'm not fluent. And it's funny, the words that stick with you. I'll always know cookie. And, there's just some silly words that'll stick with you. Mother, father, all the simple words. We all know those. But the fluency is just not there because it's a whole other language. And you have to have that effort.

She, I told my sister that, obviously she knows that there's a deaf character in here and it's inspired by her, actually multiple deaf characters. And I told her that they all Speak sign language to each other and it's perfect. And she's that's great. But yeah she was not like, you lied.

But, yeah, she said it was, she's excited. She's really proud. And she's super excited that there are deaf characters and that there's representation in the novel. And I worked really hard to, I don't speak sign language fluently, but I was around it enough, and I'm around her enough to understand the syntax of it and how that all works.

And I've read a number of books by deaf people to help with that, as I was writing a lot of that. 

Zibby: Fantastic. I found that part of the story so compelling. So I'm very glad you put it in. And it's great for everybody who might not have personal interactions with someone who's deaf to learn a little bit more about it and to, have that be a character. I just love that. And it's so meaningful to know it comes from such a personal place. 

Nanda: I appreciate it. No, thanks. It definitely adds a whole dimension to the story that I feel like it enriched the whole thing. 

Zibby: I agree. I agree. What should the reader take away? All of us have our different parts, right?

And like our, there's all that talk about how our cells completely regenerate. We're actually physically different people. every 10 years, whatever it is, science, blah, blah, blah. What do we do with the information that like inside all of us, we hold maybe not as extreme right here as your characters, but character, but that different world live in all of us.

Like where do we go from there? 

Nanda: Yeah, I just hope that readers think about identity as they read the book and their own, maybe even just the dimensionality of it. We all do this mini, micro code switching. You're the podcast host right now, and you're a totally different person, not totally different person, but you're different with your kids, and you're different with your parents.

And often when we return to our childhood situations with our parents and siblings and cousins, a side of us comes out that feels reminiscent of our childhood. Do we become the big sister, the little sister, or the middle sister, the quiet one, when in our everyday lives with our friends, we may not be that person.

I hope, readers see themselves mirrored in this book in some way, even though this situation is so drastic and not at all like I, I do feel like sometimes stories like this that are so specific are the best ones to mirror because you go so deep into someone's brain that you see the echoes of your own like personal self.

So yeah I'm hoping readers take away the complexity of identity and of their, think about their own and think about the way we sometimes pigeonhole people and we don't allow them to shape, to change or to like. We don't think about the multiple sides that people have when we meet them. 

Zibby: I love that.

I love it. Nanda, thank you so much. This book was so immersive. I loved it from first reading and it was quite complicated to pull off and you completely did it. And we'll make all versions of ourselves relate. So thank you, and thank you for trusting us with your book, and yeah, very excited.

Nanda: I appreciate it.

Thanks so much, Zibby. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Nanda: Thanks for publishing it and having me. 

Zibby: You're welcome. Okay, bye bye. 

Nanda: Bye bye.