An Interview with Eshani Surya

Eshani Surya’s debut novel, Ravishing, follows estranged siblings Kashmira and Nikhil as they

fall into the clutches of a dystopian beauty industry after the abandonment of their abusive father.

Speculative and vulnerable, the novel explores Indian American identity, queerness, the body,

chronic illness, girlhood, and friendship. In this interview, Mialise Carney and Eshani Surya

discuss writing invisible illness, the beauty industry, and making the familiar strange.

Mialise Carney: Much of the novel explores teenage Kashmira’s alienation as her family

navigates the aftermath of their abusive father leaving, her disconnection from her Indian culture, her friends, and herself as she begins to use this face-changing product. Despite the

disconnection, the novel has an empathetic tone and a focus on community, friendship, dance, and love. How did you craft this tone while still exploring heavier themes like chronic illness, identity, assimilation, and generational trauma?

Eshani Surya: It’s true that Ravishing deals with a great deal of trauma and grief, and it comes at those themes from a place of intense honesty, which can sometimes be seen as dark or heavy to readers. To me, these aspects of life are simply there and worth talking about. At the same time, to linger only in those spaces ignores our human ability to make connection in the face of disconnection; to reshape institutions and societal values; to recognize the privilege to find joy when we can. Within the story, the cast of characters finds ways to move through the world that honor and navigate both all parts of life—the novel too depicts a breadth of tones and scenes to match its content.

On a craft level, creating a novel that lives in many registers felt natural. I have never been a

committed believer to genre, so I didn’t stick to any preordained outline of what should or

shouldn’t be allowed in the novel. Instead, I wrote widely and included all the things that show up in a person’s life: work, romance, family, friendship, interests, past histories, future worries. In this way, the book became an amalgamation of ways of existence and a meditation on how we can both recognize our trauma and grief and manage alongside it.

MC: I admired how the novel metaphors the experience of living with an invisible chronic illness where someone may “look well” while being sick, as Kashmira uses this beautifying product that causes her to become increasingly ill in secret. How did you decide to put the beauty industry and chronic illness in conversation in this novel, and what did it reveal?

ES: Even early on Ravishing centered the beauty/wellness industry—there was a terrible razor-like product that altered users’ bodies—but in the years before the actual writing of the manuscript, my relationship with my appearance shifted due to my chronic illness:

I had been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a digestive illness, at twenty-one. I was very sick, but it was invisible to most people. But then, when I was twenty-six, shortly after I conceived of the initial concept for Ravishing, I was hospitalized for a reaction to a medication I was on. I lost all my hair, and my baldness functioned as a visible, ugly marker of my illness for others. Many strangers made incorrect assumptions about me, though. Most often, they thought I was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, which I was not. I came to understand that just because something is visible, that doesn’t mean others will see it for what it is.

When I revisited Ravishing, I came at it from the perspective of dichotomies. What does it mean for something to be internalized vs. externalized? What does it mean for something to be beautiful vs. ugly? And how does that relate to the ideals of wellness that the beauty industry pushes? By asking these questions, the novel opened up—it interrogated living a “healthy, lovely” life from a variety of facets, from the body, to community, to family, to trauma, to personal identity.

MC: In this novel, you give insight into how Evolvoir, as a company and their products, function in this world, without getting too bogged down in the particulars of how face morphing nanotechnology works. How did you strike the balance of giving enough information about this world for your reader to be satisfied without getting too stuck in the sci-fi weeds?

ES: I love the notion that fiction is meant to turn the strange familiar and the familiar strange,

because it speaks to how stories can help us question the norms we live in and under. Speculative elements can be key to writing with this ethos, as they slant our world slightly, thus allowing us to see the reality we know from a distanced, curious perspective.

Evolvoir and its products are not so dissimilar from the world we know. We commonly

encounter beauty/wellness products, and the thought of changing our face fully is common to us (think: social media filters, fillers, AI images). As I wrote about the technology, I drew from familiar beauty and tech companies and magnified what they could do, thus turning them strange. At the same time, a sense of their familiarity lingered, and when I shared the pages with early readers, I saw that they only needed a few specific details about the technology to buy into the concept. Importantly, these readers also saw that the novel was thematically less interested in investigating how a product like this would be made, but rather what the face changing could signify. As this matched my intent in the novel, I felt comfortable limiting the amount of other logistic information shared about the face morphing—more might have taken the novel into distracting directions.

MC: In the end, Kashmira uses VidMo to share her story and reclaim her body after the

damaging effects of ReNuLook, a unique response to traditional narratives that warn how social media negatively impacts girls’ relationship to their bodies rather than as a platform for empowerment. How did you decide to have Kashmira share her story on VidMo? Have you seen or experienced a shift in how women/girls relate to themselves and their bodies through social media?

ES: Sharing to VidMo is part of Kashmira’s ending, but it isn’t all of it. Her choice to post on

social media allows her to tell her story and warn others about what can happen when one erases themselves. However, she eventually chooses not to continue engaging on the app, and then turns to her community for connection—mostly because she sees how continuing to use VidMo can harm her.

Having Kashmira use VidMo felt important to me, as it presented her making an imperfect, yet viable decision. Kashmira’s choice to be visible on social media comes with pain points—and it almost functions like a sacrifice—even as it empowers her. Such is life, particularly the chronically ill life. Very few of us get to act and live in ideal ways, but we still do get to do something. Eschewing perfection and accepting that type of conundrum is a vital conversation that the book wants to have.

MC: I read in a past interview that the premise for this novel initially began as a flash fiction

story. What was the process like expanding the story from the limited space of 1,000 words to a 300 page novel? What parts of this story stuck with you that you knew you needed to keep writing about?

ES: The flash fiction version of Ravishing focused on a group of girls in the suburbs using

destructive beauty products. I wrote about these girls in the collective—mirroring each other, needing each other, ruining each other—and this sense of the complications of girlhood is present in the novel as well. But the flash did contain some mysteries I wanted to continue exploring: the product itself and what compelled the girls to keep using the product. These questions guided me toward future drafts in which I discovered more material around the company Evolvoir, the characters and their racial/familial/generational identities, and the deep hole of loss/abandonment that permeates much of the narrative. This, combined with the chronic illness story inherent to this version of the story, transformed the flash into the book it is now.

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Eshani Surya is the author of RAVISHING, recently out from Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic. A disabled, South Asian writer, Eshani is a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, and a Mae Fellowship recipient. Her writing has been supported by the Asian Women Writer’s Workshop and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, the anthology, Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Eshani serves as a board member and instructor at the literary non-profit Blue Stoop in Philadelphia.

Mialise Carney is a writer whose stories and essays have appeared in swamp pink, Booth, Washington Square Review, and other places. She is a PhD student in creative writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she reads for The Cincinnati Review and teaches writing.