Mothers and daughters finding their way

In “Before We Visit the Goddess,” Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores the lives of three generations of mothers and daughters, each trying to find a balance between family traditions and their own independence.

The author of 16 books, Divakaruni lives in Texas, where she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston. She will be at Warwick’s April 25 at 7:30 p.m.

Q: Where did you get the idea for this story?

A: I think this story really goes back way, way into my childhood. My mother was a single parent bringing us up, and that’s very unusual in India in the traditional family context. It was very hard for her. I remember from the time I was very young she would always talk to me about how important it is for a woman to be successful.

That is one of the central questions for me in the book. Each of the three women has to ask herself, “What does it mean to be a successful woman?” And it’s a question I’ve been asking myself all my life. The book explores whether the answer to this question changes depending on the place in which you live and the time in which you live. And does it change as you get older?

Q: Another key part of the book is how the women asking that question filter it through the generations that came before them. Is that something you did as well?

A: Absolutely. I think as with many children, female and male, I looked to my mother’s life to understand a lot of things about my own, and I also looked to her to see where her life diverged from what I consider important about my own life. I think Bela and Tara (two of the main characters) both do the same thing. In the case of Tara, she’s going back two generations to look at her grandmother’s life in order to understand and in some ways heal her own life.

Q: I understand your mother wanted to be a writer, too?

A: She did. And only at the end of her life did she start writing down by hand in our native language, which is Bengali, some stories out of her childhood.

Q: This isn’t the first book you’ve written about identity, or re-creating identity. What draws you to that?

A: I think I’ve been interested in that personally because when I came to America, I was 19 and really at a moment when I was discovering what it meant to be a self — a self as opposed to a daughter in a family. I came to America, and all of a sudden I was no longer in that family environment which had really cocooned me in both good ways and bad all of my life. I had to figure out the answers for myself. And the answers that had been given to me generationally and culturally were no longer fully appropriate.

That’s always been very important to me in my life. Who am I? That’s a basic and deep question that I think everyone should ask themselves, because if we don’t ask that we’re living on a relatively superficial level. I think I come back to that question, over and over, in very different ways in my books. Not only for women, but for men, too.

Q: It seems a particular part of the immigrant story. Do you find your students who aren’t immigrants asking themselves the same questions?

A: For a lot of my students who have been born and brought up in this country, they have to ask themselves that, but sometimes they have to detach from the family. For us as immigrants, that detachment just happened. It was a course of history or destiny. But for a lot of my students, they have to initiate that detachment in order to find out who they are. Sometimes, interestingly, in the course of their development they go back to the family in order to find out who they are.

Q: How does being a university professor shape your own writing?

A: For one thing, teaching writing just keeps me current. It makes me continue to read and examine books in a much more stringent way, in a much more conscious way, than it would be if I weren’t going to be teaching those texts. I have to really try to keep up with what’s going on in the field of literature and books. I need to be able to talk about those things with my students, and that really seeps into my own writing. Especially since I deal with a lot of craft issues, I’m very aware when I’m writing of the craft issues in my novels. I think it really just makes me push myself more and aim for higher standards. Teaching is really the best way of learning anything.

Q: Do you teach your own books?

A: No, I don’t. That’s a little too close. Every once in a while I will teach maybe a segment of a book or a story to show students what I’ve done to create a certain effect. Let’s say we’re talking about dialogue. I might choose a passage, and I might also bring in an earlier version and a later version so that they can see what I started with and how I revised it and why I revised it. That’s about the only time I teach my own work.

Q: At this point in your career, why do you write?

A: That’s a huge question that can be answered on many levels. I’ll answer it with a little story. Quite a few years back, we were moving from San Francisco to Houston. I was going nuts. I’m not a good mover in any case, and the whole idea of moving to Texas was kind of overwhelming. I was running around and I was getting all worked up. The packers were packing and the children were hungry and my husband was not there because he had already started his new job. I remember my oldest son, who was maybe in the third grade, took me by the hand and he said, “Mommy, you need to go to your writing desk for a while and write.”

You know how they say out of the mouths of babes? It struck me that he had understood something about me, which is that writing makes me happy. It calms me down, and I think I’m a better person because of it. It gives me a lot of joy, but it also gives me a lot of peace and a sense, maybe delusional, of control in a life that is often out of control.

And I write because I believe books are important in terms of communication. Books can change lives; certainly books have changed mine. So my hope is that perhaps my books are changing lives somewhere in some small way.