Earlier this week, I featured the new novel by Falguni Kothari titled My Last Love Story, for her release day blitz. I asked the author some questions about her book and writing, and our interview is as follows:
Please tell us a little about yourself and your latest book.
Hello! I am NY-based hybrid author and I write novels about India mostly and its diaspora. I’m published in romance and fantasy fiction and with My Last Love Story, my latest book, I’ve added women’s fiction to my writer repertoire.
My Last Love Story is a narrative about an unconventional love triangle between a fate-battered young woman, Simeen, who has come to fear love and happiness, her terminal husband, Nirvaan, who wants Simeen to stop living in fear, and their best friend, Zayaan, the man Simeen had once agreed to marry. This novel is an exploration on the complexities of trauma and the true qualities of love.
How did you come up with its title?
My working title for this story was Love Undeniable. Heart Unreliable. For about 60% of my first draft, this title was stuck in my head. I thought it held a nice ring of truth to it. But then I wrote a scene between Simeen and Nirvaan in which she tells him that he was her last love story. It was like an epiphany. I immediately realized that I’d stumbled on gold. I’m so happy that the right title came to me at the right moment.
Who is your favorite character in MLLS?
I don’t have a favorite. I love them all. ☺
What genre do you enjoy writing the most and why?
I think mythic fantasy because it takes the best parts of all other genres into itself. A good fantasy novel has action and adventure, an epic love story, a mystery, the paranormal, life lessons, women of strength and men of valor woven into it. It has a story within a story. It is a coming of age story. You get the drift.
How would you describe your writing style?
I’m both a pantser and a plotter, depending on the book I’m writing. My prose is easy to follow and humorous. It is snarky and smexy at times, but mostly its just fun.
What authors inspire your writing? Do you have a mentor?
Many authors have inspired me. Many other people besides authors have inspired me to write. MLLS was in part inspired by a cousin who succumbed to cancer way too early in life. We were both teenagers when she was diagnosed, and it was horrible. She was a writer too. She kept journals and wrote letters and her thoughts about life and love and everything in between in them. I’ve dedicated MLLS to her.
No, I don’t have a mentor.
What would you like to be if you weren’t a writer?
I am a woman—I love that. I was a jewelry designer in the distant past. I was a potter. I am a mother, a daughter, a wife and a dog companion. I have my hands full even if I wasn’t writing. But, I am incredibly glad that I am one.
What are you working on now?
I am plotting Book 2 in my Age of Kali mythic fantasy series.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Find your niche and sit down and write. Don’t think about what happens after the manuscript. Finish the manuscript first.
If you have to choose only one book to keep, knowing the others would be destroyed, which one would you save?
The Mahabharata. It’s the longest and most comprehensive Indian epic and it is said that all things related to man and God, earth and the sky are found within it. That if something exists, it has a place in the Mahabharata. If that is true, then saving the epic would make the most sense.
About the Book:
Perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes’s, Me Before You, My Last Love Story is a heartbreakingly romantic tale about the complexities of trauma and whether love can right a wrong.
I, Simeen Desai, am tired of making lemonade with the lemons life has handed me.
Love is meant to heal wounds.
Love was meant to make my world sparkle and spin.
Love has ripped my life apart and shattered my soul.
I love my husband, and he loves me.
But Nirvaan is dying.
I love my husband. I want to make him happy.
But he is asking for the impossible.
I don’t want a baby.
I don’t want to make nice with Zayaan.
I don’t want another chance at another love story.
Book Links:
Goodreads * Amazon US * Amazon IN
Advance Praise:
At once heartbreaking, delightful and completely unexpected. A must read!
~ Sonali Dev, author of The Bollywood Affair
In My Last Love Story, Kothari examines love and loss, desire and desolation, with a deft, wry touch that kept me reading late into the night and moved me to tears.
~ Julia Tagan, author of Stages of Desire
About the Author:
Falguni Kothari is an internationally bestselling hybrid author and an amateur Latin and Ballroom dance silver medalist with a background in Indian Classical dance. She writes in a variety of genres sewn together by the colorful threads of her South Asian heritage and expat experiences. When not writing or dancing, she fools around on all manner of social media, and loves to connect with her readers. My Last Love Story is her fourth novel.
Contact the Author:
Website * Blog * Twitter * Facebook * Goodreads * Pinterest
Dear Readers, thank you for coming along on the My Last Love Story Blog Tour. Here’s an excerpt to enjoy.
ONE
“Love is a dish best served naked.”
As a child, those oft-quoted words of my father would have me rolling my eyes and pretending to gag at what I’d imagined was my parents’ precursor to a certain physical act.
At thirty, I’d long ago realized that getting naked wasn’t a euphemism for sex.
Neither was love.
It wasn’t my father wording the meme just now but my husband. Nirvaan considered himself a great wit, a New Age philosopher. On the best of days, he was, much like Daddy had been. On the worst days, he was my tormentor.
“What do you think, Dr. Archer? Interesting enough tagline for a vlog? What about ‘Baby in a Petri Dish’?” Nirvaan persisted in eliciting a response from the doctor and/or me for his ad hoc comedy, which we’d been ignoring for several minutes now.
I wanted to glare at him, beg him to shut up, or demand that he wait in the doctor’s office like he should’ve done, like a normal husband would have. Khodai knows why he’d insisted on holding my hand through this preliminary checkup. Nothing of import would happen today—if it did at all. But I couldn’t perform any such communication, not with my eyes and mouth squeezed shut while I suffered through a series of uncomfortable twinges along my nether regions.
I lay flat on my back on a spongy clinic bed sheeted with paper already wrinkled and half torn. Legs drawn up and spread apart, my heels dug punishingly into cold iron stirrups to allow my gynecologist’s clever fingers to reach inside my womb and check if everything was A-OK in there. We’d already funneled through the Pap test and stomach and chest checks. Like them, this test, too, was going swell in light of Dr. Archer’s approving happy hums.
“Excellent, Mrs. Desai. All parts are where they should be,” he joked only as a doctor could.
I shuddered out the breath I’d been holding, as the feeling of being stretched left my body. Nirvaan squeezed my hand and planted a smacking kiss on my forehead. I opened my eyes and focused on his beaming upside-down ones. His eyelids barely grew lashes anymore—I’d counted twenty-seven in total just last week—the effect of years of chemotherapy. For a second, my gaze blurred, my heart wavered, and I almost cried.
What are we doing, Nirvaan? What in Khodai’s name were we starting?
Nirvaan stroked my hair, his pitch-black pupils steady and knowing and oh-so stubborn. Then, his face rose to the stark white ceiling, and all I saw was the green-and-blue mesh of his gingham shirt—the overlapping threads, the crisscross weaves, a pattern without end.
Life is what you make it, child. It was another one of my father’s truisms.
Swallowing the questions twirling on my tongue, I refocused my mind on why we were here. I’d promised Nirvaan we’d try for a baby if he agreed to another round of cancer-blasting treatments. I’d bartered for a few more months of my husband’s life. He’d bartered for immortality through our child.
Dr. Archer rolled away from between my legs to the computer station. He snapped off and disposed of the latex gloves. Then, he began typing notes in near-soundless staccato clicks. Though the examination was finished, I knew better than to sit up until he gave me leave. I’d been here before, done this before—two years ago when Nirvaan had been in remission and the idea of having a baby had wormed its way into his head. We’d tried the most basic procedures then, whatever our medical coverage had allowed. We hadn’t been desperate yet to use our own money, which we shouldn’t be touching even now. We needed every penny we had for emergencies and alternative treatments, but try budging my husband once he’d made up his mind.
“I’m a businessman, Simi. I only pour money into a sure thing,” he rebuked when I argued.
I brought my legs together, manufacturing what poise and modesty I could, and pulled the sea-green hospital gown bunched beneath my bottom across my half-naked body. I refused to look at my husband as I wriggled about, positive his expression would be pregnant with irony, if not fully smirking. And kudos to him for not jumping in to help me like I would have.
The tables had turned on us today. For the past five years, it’d been Nirvaan thrashing about on hospital beds, trying in vain to find relief and comfort, modesty or release. Nirvaan had been poked, prodded, sliced, and bled as he battled aggressive non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I’d been the stoic spectator, the supportive wife, the incompetent nurse, the ineffectual lover.
And now? What role would I play now?
As always, thinking about our life left me feeling even more naked than I was in the open-fronted robe. I turned my face to the wall, my eyes stinging, as fear and frustration bubbled to the surface. Flesh-toned posters of laughing babies, pregnant mothers, and love-struck fathers hung from the bluish walls. Side by side were the more educative ones of human anatomy, vivisected and whole. The test-tube-like exam room of Monterey Bay Fertility Clinic was decorated in true California beach colors—sea-foam walls, sandy floors, pearl-pink curtains, and furniture—bringing the outdoors in. If the decor was meant to be homey, it wasn’t having such an effect on me. This room, like this town and even this country, was not my natural habitat, and I felt out of my element in it.
I’d lived in California for seven years now, ever since my marriage, and I still didn’t think of it as home, not like Nirvaan did. Home for me was India. And no matter the dark memories it held, home would always be Surat.
“All done.” Dr. Archer pushed the computer trolley away and stood up. “You can get dressed, Mrs. Desai. Take your time. Use whatever supplies you need. We’ll wait for you in my office,” he said, smiling.
Finally, I can cover myself, I thought. Gooseflesh had erupted across my skin due to the near frigid clinic temperatures doctors tortured their patients with—like a patient didn’t have enough to suffer already. Medical facilities maintained cool indoor temperatures to deter inveterate germs from contaminating the premises and so its vast flotilla of equipment didn’t fry. I knew that. But knowing it still didn’t inspire any warm feelings in me for the “throng of professional sadists with a god complex.” I quoted my husband there.
Nirvaan captured my attention with a pat on my head. “See you soon, baby,” he said, following the doctor out of the room.
I scooted off the bed as soon as the door shut behind them. My hair tumbled down my face and shoulders at my jerky movements. I smoothed it back with shaking hands. Long, wavy, and a deep chestnut shade, my hair was my crowning glory, my one and only feature that was lush and arresting. Nirvaan loved my hair. I wasn’t to cut it or even braid it in his presence, and so it often got hopelessly knotted.
I shrugged off the clinic gown, balled it up, and placed it on the bed. I wiped myself again and again with antiseptic wipes, baby wipes, and paper towels until the tissues came away stain-free. I didn’t feel light-headed. I didn’t allow myself to freak. I concentrated on the flow of my breaths and the pounding of my heart until they both slowed to normal.
It was okay. I was not walking out with a gift-wrapped baby in tow. Not today. No reason to freak out.
I reached for my clothes and slipped on my underwear. They were beige with tiny white hearts on them—Victoria’s Secret lingerie Nirvaan had leered and whistled at this morning.
Such a silly man. Typical Nirvaan, I corrected, twisting my lips.
Even after dressing in red-wash jeans and a full-sleeved sweater, I shivered. My womb still felt invaded and odd. As I stepped into my red patent leather pumps, an unused Petri dish sitting on the workstation countertop caught my eye.
The trigger for Nirvaan’s impromptu comedy, perhaps?
Despite major misgivings about the Hitleresque direction my life had taken, humor got the better of me, and I grinned.
Silly, silly Nirvaan. Baby in a Petri dish, indeed.
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