A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL WITHIN A GIRL

Nanda Reddy is a Guyanese American writer and former elementary school teacher. She immigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was nine years old and grew up in Miami, Florida. She loves visiting off-the-grid places, hiking, and painting with watercolors. She currently resides in Reno, Nevada, with her husband and two teenage sons. A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl is her first novel.

“Too important and gripping to put down. A coming-of-age story that is at once shocking and necessary.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A captivating debut from an exciting new voice in fiction, Reddy shares an eye-opening story of a woman haunted by the harrowing events of her past. Told with bold and beautifully layered prose, A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl is a heart-wrenching and inspirational exploration of survival, resilience, and grit, reminding us to be tenacious when fighting for ourselves. Complex, compelling, and masterful, this book shines, teaches, and rewards.” —Diane Marie Brown, author of Black Candle Women

“A kaleidoscopic investigation of identity and its shaping forces, A Girl Within A Girl Within A Girl explores what happens when you’re forced to confront the past you thought you left behind. A riveting story of one woman’s journey to build and protect her life, Nanda Reddy’s debut will hold you in its grasp until the final page.” —Alina Grabowski, author of Women and Children First

“A many layered musing on what identity truly means, A Girl Within A Girl Within A Girl peels back its complex, powerful heroine’s folds with slow precision, revealing an explosive, shocking story that ultimately transforms into an ode to love.” —Nayantara Roy, author of The Magnificent Ruins

“An urgent and necessary novel. Set in the 1980s, Reddy’s story of a young trafficking victim could just as easily have taken place today. As bighearted as it is heartbreaking, A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl does not dwell in darkness. This is a story rich in empathy, riveting, and redemptive.” —Leyna Krow, author of Fire Season

“A devastating and tremendous debut. This artfully constructed story delivers suspense, terror, thrilling self-salvation and life-transforming moments of human compassion. It’s about all the selves we try to shed, and how we must stitch ourselves whole, humble and powerful again. I can’t remember the last time I was impacted so emotionally by a novel.” —Angela Mi Young Hur, author of Folklorn  

“Propulsive and gripping, in A Girl Within A Girl Within A Girl Nanda Reddy has crafted a vivid account of a harrowing journey into womanhood. Reddy’s dynamic narrative seamlessly weaves a coming-of-age tale with a turbulent and suspenseful account of migration. This edge-of-your-seat read packs quite a punch.”  —Mai Sennaar, author of They Dream In Gold

Book club kit

1. This novel’s scope encompasses many themes: coming-of-age, immigration, and survival, to name a few. In your view, what is the most important one? And why?
2. The novel is uniquely structured in parts that coincide with shifts in the protagonist’s identity. How did this structure influence your understanding of the formation of identity as a journey and, to some extent, an individual choice? Did the structure and different names the protagonist uses emphasize transitional chapters in your own life or times when you had to embrace change?
3. Maya worries that Dwayne will no longer love her if she reveals the truth about her identity. How did the backstory Maya created for herself affect who she was in her marriage?
4. As depicted in the book, code-switching is part of the assimilation process. Based on the dramatic range of Sunny’s experiences, how much do you think code-switching is a natural part of everyday life versus a social requirement, given current cultural standards?
5. The protagonist tattoos the words “Begin Again” on her ankle—those words become her mantra. What does Begin Again mean to you?
6. Compare and contrast the United States that Sunny envisions at the start of the novel while still in Guyana to her experiences once she arrives. How do the realities she encounters growing up in the United States differ from the sparkling vision of the country she had as a child? How does her vision of Guyana change over time?
7. There are a lot of characters throughout the novel who help our protagonist along her journey—specifically Lila, Yvonne, and Janna. How are these women similar? How are they different? Is there anyone else in the novel you might describe as a helper?
8. The protagonist goes through a great deal of trauma throughout her adolescence—from a sense of abandonment and a massive amount of pressure from her family’s expectations, to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Prem. How did these traumas impact her self-image?
9. The protagonist consistently mourns and thinks about her connection to her sister, Roshi, as she grows older. This connection becomes physical when it is revealed that they each might carry a cancerous gene. What does this physical bond represent in a novel that constantly emphasizes reinvention and stripping oneself of previously held identities?
10. What do you imagine Maya’s experience is of returning to Guyana with her new family and reconnecting with her old family?

Some moments sear themselves onto your brain. Me standing by the kitchen sink, the dogwood flowering outside the window, this envelope in my trembling hands.

They’ve found me.

The air thickens and sounds recede.

The blue-and-red-striped envelope is covered in foreign stamps and bears names I haven’t heard in decades. My heart hammers and buried memories stir as I turn it over. The flap is barely affixed, the glue having failed. Inside is a yellowed sheet of paper. Thin and soft, its rough edge hints at a former life in a school notebook. This is third-world paper with faint, weirdly spaced lines, a cockroachy stuck-in-a-box-for-years smell. Dated over a month ago, the letter addresses someone dead.

Dear Sunny,

Ma pass last year, 23 May. She had the sugar, lost one eye, and infection in left foot. But cancer got her. I try to find you, but I never reach you.

Now, cancer got me. The doctor find a lump in my breast couple months ago. My daughter in New York search at a government place and find this address for you. I pray it work because I am scared the cancer is bad, and I hope to see you one more time. Plus the doctors say you should check for a gene.

Sunny, I never believe the lies about you. Even Daddy accept the truth now.

But even if you can’t forgive Daddy, please come see your dying sister.

With love,
Roshini

A long-distance telephone number, a website, and an email address sit below the signature.

My eyes rove the lines again and again, but the words swim without quite sinking in and singsong creole fills my ears. Ma pass, lump in my breast, check for a gene, dying sister.

“Time to go, boys.” Dwayne’s booming voice snaps me back to myself, and I resist an insane urge to bring the paper to my face and eat it. As if that could return us to the before world. But this letter has cleaved time. There will only be life after.

I will have to tell him. My husband. A man who’s never heard the name Sunny. Who’s never heard of Roshini. Who believes I don’t know my mother or father. Who knows me by only one name. He’s on the upstairs landing-turned-play-space talking to our boys, saying, “Backpacks together, TV off, toys away,” unaware the planet just tilted.

A familiar documentary continues to blare, something about white dwarves and red giants, and I picture our seven-year-old son, Nico, belly-down on the floor, glued to the screen; eleven-year-old Camden riffling through LEGO bins, his hearing aids turned off. My babies.

Gene. The word grips me and I understand. I might leave them motherless after all. Despite everything I did to protect them from that fate.

Dwayne claps and repeats his commands, and the TV goes silent. They’ll be down any second, and here I am with this bomb in my hands.

I can’t detonate it. Not yet. I need more time.

I stuff it in my sweatshirt pocket, blink my eyes clear, and shake the fog from my head. The kitchen island is covered with food. Cold eggs, bacon, and bagels. A colander of blueberries. Bread, lunch meat, and vegetables. Normally, I’d have plated blog-worthy breakfasts and lunches by now. And have cleaned up. The clutter overwhelms me.

My hands move sluggishly as the letter hijacks my mind. Ma pass last year. How did I not know? There must have been a jolt, some noticeable shift in the universe. Had I ignored it? To do what instead? Clean teeth and saturate myself with the minutiae of patients’ lives? Decorate bulletin boards at the boys’ school that I’d dismantle a month later? Organize drawers and sort LEGO blocks by color? Or could I have been laughing as she died? Learning choreography with Dwayne at our ballroom dancing class? Gossiping and curating pictures for the cooking blog I manage with Dwayne’s sister and my two best friends? Best friends who don’t know me.

I force a smile as the boys descend the stairs, Nico whooping on Dwayne’s back, Cam skipping ahead because he’s outgrown that kind of thing. My perfect family. Will I lose them? Will they lose me? Dwayne fills the room, not just with his six-foot-two football-player frame, but with his signature ebullience, which never fails to lift me. Even now, with earth-shattering words in my head, my body lightens a little when he says, “Morning, Mama.”

He sets Nico on his stool with fanfare and adds, “The sky’s falling.” It’s what he says when there’s a global stock market dip, one that could send his investment clients into a tailspin. “Blue skies today” would have told me he spent the morning watching foreign markets soar after his 4:00 a.m. run, a run that always ends with him grabbing the newspapers and the mail. He’d dropped the letter onto our counter this morning, hidden amid catalogs. He doesn’t realize how ominous his words are today.

The breakfast plates are a jumble of eggs, bread, and fruit. I move berries in a wobbly circle around the food—a small attempt at my usual photogenic presentation—before placing the plates on the eat-in counter.

“Mom, did you know the sun’s gonna explode?” Nico asks, swiveling his stool and accidentally hitting Cam’s.

Cam gives him a dirty look before shifting away, and Dwayne shouts, “Boosh” to give Nico’s words a sound effect.

My heart swells at this noisy, familiar routine.

“Is that right?” I say, simultaneously signing “Good morning” to Cam. I also sign Nico’s question so Cam feels included, even though he barely glances up.

“But it’s not for, like, five billion years,” Nico says. He stuffs berries into his mouth, seemingly unaware of his chaotic plate. He swivels before adding, “We’ll be dead by then.”

Dead. My eyes twitch. I don’t sign that sentence. I turn and busy myself with the blender I’d washed earlier, drying it with a towel. Ma pass last year. Dying sister. Gene. A gene! How much longer do I have with them?

A black hole opens inside me, and the blender slips. I catch it in time and set it on the counter, shaken. Dwayne hugs me from behind and says, “Thanks for breakfast, babe.” He plants a kiss on the messy bun atop my head while reaching for one of the spinach smoothies I’d made.

I nod, and my body tightens as the letter crinkles in my pocket. I never wanted to lie to him. Not when our eyes connected in that bookstore almost two decades ago, not when we got married, not when our children were born. How did I let things get so far?

I never believe the lies about you.

My heart cramps as a memory dislodges and surfaces. That last day in Miami. Him. He is the reason I’m in this mess. His face invades my mind, and I grip the counter to push him back from where he’s risen. I force my mind toward to-do lists as I clear away food. I need fresh spices for that cheesecake—cardamom and star anise. I should dry-clean that dress before the party this weekend. And we’re low on teeth-whitening kits at work. But the mental tactics that have worked for thirty years to bury my past fail me. His menacing face thrusts into my brain. I shut the fridge door as if shutting it on him.

Dwayne complains about work, listing clients he might have to talk off the ledge, and I force myself to focus on his words. “Some people can’t see opportunity even if it’s staring them right in the face,” he says, laughing. Dwayne’s magic has always been an ability to sweep me into a cascade of energy that leaves no room for mulling and downward spiraling. I smile, wanting his laughter to flood me, to reset me into a wife with her baggage neatly tucked away, a woman devoid of a past and in control of her future. I want to return there, even if for just a minute. But the future unspools before me.

“Big plans for the day off?” Dwayne asks, sipping his smoothie and finally making eye contact.

I feel caught, and my mind blanks. What am I doing today? It takes me a second to remember the plans I made for my day off. “Uh, a run, and a nail appointment for the party this weekend. Then, um, cooking group with Denise and the girls. And photocopying for Cam’s teacher.”

His eyes narrow. “You good?”

My face twitches as I try to fix the flaw he sees. Then my hand moves of its own accord. No. Not like this. Think it through. Do it right. But the offending hand, disembodied, holds up the letter. A white flag to end a one-sided war—a war I’ve waged for far too long. Gene. Dying sister. It’s time. Even if that madman is still hunting me, and even if Dwayne doesn’t forgive me. I have to come clean. I owe it to him. To our kids. To my sister. To myself.

I hand it to him and, shaking, turn away. How do I even begin?

In the backyard, the dogwood’s pink blossoms catch sunlight, looking mockingly perfect. The tree has been blissfully tripping around the sun, never needing to pretend it’s anything other than a tree. While I’ve built a whole life on lies.

1. What was your inspiration for the book?

This story came to me a few years before I wrote a word of it. I was on vacation in Costa Rica, and a tour guide made the honest assumption that I was from India. I didn’t correct him because it didn’t bother me, and there wasn’t time to discuss the Indian diaspora, but the idea of an Indo-Caribbean woman who hides her true identity popped into my head. I was intrigued by the idea of someone who allows others’ assumptions to shape what they know about her, someone who reinvents herself to erase her past. I didn’t know the details of the story then, but I knew I’d end up mining small truths from my life for the book.

As an immigrant who is brown, I’ve grown adept at code-switching. I’m aware I will always be perceived as an other, at least initially, anytime I meet someone, and that acting and sounding “American” changes how they behave toward me. That’s always fascinated me, and it’s something I explore with my main character. I also examine the idea of curating a life to hide all the ugly things, the secret, unfaceable things. On some level, it’s something I think everyone does, hiding parts of ourselves and showing only the pretty stuff. My protagonist builds a life on this for the most part.

2. Your own immigration story is quite different from that of your protagonist. What was your experience as a young immigrant to the U.S.? In what ways did it inform this story?

Unlike my protagonist, I arrived in the U.S. with papers and with my entire family. We were welcomed by my father’s extended family, with whom we lived for about a year, who set my parents up for success by facilitating jobs, helping with rides, watching us kids, etc.

Even so, I was a fish out of water and floundered upon arrival. Ah, the shock of it! I was nine, and all I knew of America were the things relatives had brought to Guyana during visits.

Apples and Crayola crayons; store-bought clothes and dolls. With my accented English, braided hair, homemade clothes, and shy demeanor, I did not fit into the treacherous American school culture. We were the last of my father’s family to arrive, so I didn’t even fit in with my many cousins, who’d arrived years before me or were born in America. This compounded my sense of isolation, and I assumed there was something wrong with me. Feelings and experiences from that time definitely informed my character’s journey.

3. Over the course of the novel, the protagonist becomes an expert at code-switching. How do you think code-switching factors into our everyday lives in today’s culture?

In my novel, the young protagonist speaks a form of Creole English, and she’s judged negatively for this, even by the Guyanese people among her. She works to “fix” her speech, but she quickly learns that acceptance into American culture requires more than just language. Much of her identity shifting in the story is related to learning to code-switch on a macro level to survive.

But I believe code-switching occurs at a micro level for most people, particularly as we’ve grown accustomed to social media. Everyone everywhere understands that most profiles are curated to some degree, that posters follow a code in their profiles, and that nuanced, messy, honest selves might implode their personas. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with this; I think it’s natural for us to speak and act differently in different situations, at work versus around friends, for example. But, I’m not sure we fess up to our own multiple selves, much less examine and come to terms with them.

4. What was behind your choice to include several deaf characters in the novel?

I didn’t set out to write deaf characters, but they showed up as soon as I started writing. That’s likely because I have a deaf sister, and we mine from our lives, us novelists.

In one of the first scenes, the protagonist is with her deaf older sister, and there’s a dynamic in which she wonders what her sister is thinking but can’t just ask. She serves as her sister’s interpreter, but their communication is coarse and rudimentary, and they’ve reached an age where it’s stopped serving them. She’s also desperate to be alone and leave her sister, who’s always by her side. A similar dynamic once existed between me and my deaf older sister when we were young; I leaned into this and exaggerated it in the fictional setting.

In my early draft, I worried people might assume the sister relationship is autobiographical, but Roshi is very different from my sister, and their lives are drastically different. I kept the character because she quickly became pivotal ANDbecause I felt her representation mattered. And my sister was excited to know I included a deaf character in the book.

The protagonist’s deaf son and her husband’s deaf sister were created for tension since she keeps her sister a secret. Plus, I loved the idea of showing a utopic deaf world full of sign language, something my sister, sadly, did not live.

5. This book features a notably diverse cast of characters. How did you address differences in language from Guyanese patois to sign language to Spanish in your writing process?

Authenticity was important to me as these characters sprung up and spoke, and I often went by intuition as I wrote. But my intuition was fed by experience. I grew up in Miami in a diverse neighborhood and attended diverse schools where Spanish was prevalent; as someone who was self-conscious about her accent and speech, I studied how different groups spoke—their slang and their mannerisms. I had no idea this would serve me as a writer in my adulthood. For the patois and sign language, I created a style guide to stay consistent on the page. I also worked hard to represent the characters and their speech with respect, which is important to me.

6. Your protagonist is a book lover. Is there a novel that has been particularly influential to you?

The books cited in the novel have been influential during different periods of my life.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, was one of the first books I read that showed me honest, gritty stories by non-whites can be told. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, was influential in my late adolescence, though I no longer believe its tenets. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, was one of the first novels I read that addressed colonialism in a critical light, and it was the first time I began thinking critically about Guyana as a British colony. But the book that made me want to read again and inspired me to write is White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Its poetic prose felt like magic, and I wanted to try my hand at it, though I did it secretly and badly for years!

7. What do you hope readers take away from this novel?

I hope this book causes readers to think about the dimensionality of identity. Their own identity—the versions of themselves that have existed. And others’ identities, which we often try to pigeonhole, not wanting to deal with complexity and nuance.

I also hope this book helps readers look at immigration and assimilation in a nuanced and critical way. There is no right-wrong position presented in this novel, but there is a complicated situation that’s worth discussing. Finally, I hope readers are curious about Guyana and the Indian diaspora there—enough to learn more about it.

8. Can you speak to your writing process a little bit? Do you follow a set routine and schedule, or were you looser in your approach to writing this novel?

I wish I were the sort of writer who sets a schedule and sticks to it, but I’m a lot looser than that. In drafting this book, I signed up for a course that forced me to meet word count deadlines, and I learned that showing up often triggers the muse. But sometimes it helps to let story ideas marinate; I’ve learned that, too.

9. Are you working on anything new?

My WIP is a departure from this novel, a psychological thriller that addresses the aftermath of a kidnapping. But the protagonist is also a Guyanese-American woman, and identity is also a theme.