All This Could Be Different ⭐

A conversation with Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different

The first chapter of All This Could Be Different, a novel by Sarah Thankam Mathews, ends with my one of favorite sentences ever written:

“As the summer began, I moved to Milwaukee, a rusted city where I had nobody, parents two oceans away, I lay on the sun-warmed wood floor of my paid-for apartment and decided I would be a slut.”

On top of being an aspiring slut, Sneha, our heroine, is trying to survive her first year out of college. She has a soul-crushing corporate job, for which she receives no benefits and is unscrupulously taxed as a freelancer. Her boss, Peter, insists that she wear pantyhose and make-up (“nothing tarty“) to the office. Quitting is not an option—it’s 2012, still the recession, and she’s dependent on Peter for a work visa. He also pays for her apartment, which comes complete with a property manager whose asymmetrical haircut turns out to be more Kate Gosselin than Cameron Esposito.

All This Could Be Different is primarily a novel about friendship. Sneha is joined in Milwaukee by Thom, her idealistic best friend from college, and Tig, a philosopher who dreams of starting a commune to keep her friends and family housed, fed, and safe. There’s also a love interest, Marina, a dancer who Sneha meets through a combination of OkCupid and irl encounters. This novel is funny and alive with the optimism, and naïveté, of life in your early 20s. It made me feel old in the best way possible. There’s friend breakups, circular lesbian processing, and sex in the front seat of a Kia Soul. Fans of Milwaukee will recognize Brewers Hill, Y-Not II, the Cactus Club, and many other landmarks.

All This Could Be Different was a finalist for the National Book Award and came out on paperback in August. I tore through it in two sittings, cackling to my pitbull all the way. I was lucky enough to speak to Sarah about her work in mutual aid, writing flawed characters, and navigating the pressures of “good“ representation.

Maddy: You wrote All This Could Be Different at the beginning of the pandemic, around the time you founded Bed-Stuy Strong—a mutual aid organization in Brooklyn. So much of Sneha’s story explores friendship and what it means to choose community over individualism, even when that community is imperfect and messy. I’m wondering how the pandemic and your work in mutual aid influenced your writing, or the way you thought about community?

Sarah: Hey Maddy! So happy to be in conversation with you, I’ve loved your work for years. Yeah, the general trajectory for me was a little like: get extremely depressed and stop writing altogether. Work on organizing with other people during this super galvanizing and desperate moment of mass crisis–COVID-19 in New York in 2020–including, as you said, founding Bed-Stuy Strong, a mutual aid network that supported 28,000 people with survival needs, and collectively leading it with some really wonderful, committed, thoughtful people. Realize after months of this that what I wanted to do, more than anything, was to write the book I had in mind, that I had been thinking about in quiet snatches of my day. Write manuscript that ended up becoming All This Could Be Different, and in that writing, feel aware of:

1. The way in which my material circumstances–rent, bills, visa shit, my COVID-spurred unemployment, callous bosses, avaricious landlords–had formed the plot of my adult life every bit as much as romantic love.

2. The way in which all around me, particularly because of organizing, I saw regular degular people trying to care for each other, in mundane and heart-stoppingly generous ways, so many acts of ordinary and muscular goodness. And I thought, There is something here. I want to try to capture this feeling, this movement from an I to a We, the many subtle lessons of this year, in fiction, in a way that insists on capaciousness, generosity, and multiplicity.

3. The way in which I felt, deeply, what I had known previously only intellectually to be true, that the world as we receive it is a made thing, and by that logic can be remade. All this could be, etc.  

So yeah, the collective of Bed-Stuy Strong and my novel existed in quiet conversation with each other, each informing and shaping the other. 

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M: I’m so happy to be talking to you, too. I loved this novel and I gasped at #1!! I’ve had bad girlfriends and bad landlords in my time and I’m not sure which is worse. Speaking of villains, there are several in ATCBD but the most looming is Amy, the white property manager in charge of the duplex where Sneha lives. Amy lives directly below Sneha and monitors her comings and goings with a deep, relentless hostility that Sneha eventually realizes is racism. There’s something so intimate about the way Amy wields power over Sneha and Sneha, in turn, witnesses Amy in some vulnerable moments and possibly even clocks her as queer and closeted. Can you talk about giving villains interiority and where bad people fit into these broader themes of community and remaking the world?

S: Ahh, you’ve touched on something I found really preoccupying and challenging in writing ATCBD.  When I was first drafting my manuscript, Peter was named Hari, and there were a few since-cut scenes that more or less made clear that Amy is something other than straight. I wanted at first, I think, to play with the notion of representational politics in this way — to ask what it meant if Sneha’s shitty boss was also Indian, if her menacing property manager was also gay. A darker, more faceted presentation of community, if you will. But the further I went down this road the muddier it became, and I changed course.

For what it’s worth, my personal understanding of Amy is that she is certainly racist but also jealous of Sneha, for a multitude of reasons. But in writing ATCBD, I made a choice that felt complicated to me but also truthful, to have the narrative intelligence of the novel mostly locked within my main character, who could only have a limited sense of the interiority of these people who, because of the material power they wield over her, are able to cause her harm. I had to trust that the reader would be able to make meaning from the negative space provided, to realize that Amy and Peter are people who cause Sneha meaningful suffering, but to most people in *their* lives, they are not villains. Peter in particular, I think, could be understood as a perfectly run-of-the-mill boss, doing what he needed to do to look out for his bottom line.

Part of the novel’s gestural politics, I think / hope, are this movement towards the idea that we are all capacious, the beloveds of some people’s lives and the villains or also-rans of others. That capaciousness functions in contrast to the logic of carcerality, that says, all you are and will be is the worst thing you’ve done. BUT. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t or shouldn’t be some kind of reckoning or acknowledgment of wrongs done. That’s part of what the closing of the novel hints at, where Amy makes one final appearance — that some form of reckoning can come one day. 

M: I mean, these are all reasons why Sneha is such a satisfying narrator—she has so many flaws and defense mechanisms, but as readers we get to know her in the full context of her immigration status, financial anxiety, trauma, and general inexperience with life (she’s only 22, a baby!!) I know I already asked you about the villains of ATCBD, but did you have any trepidations about writing a young, female immigrant character who’s not like, totally agreeable and perfect?

S: This is such a sweet, considered question. I didn’t, actually. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. It helped that I didn’t really write it imagining it being published, if that makes sense. I was just some guy scribbling and hoping. I felt like I was in a very private place, trying to grapple with these characters, and try to think about how to capture a very young person’s political and emotional movement and growth. I knew I wanted Sneha to be complex and lovable and unsteady and at least on occasion a 22 year old little dumbass. To be afforded full humanity is to be given the latitude to make mistakes, the latitude to be something other than demure and delightful. I wanted to write Sneha to be dense and memorable and as real as I could make her. Finally, I wanted to create a certain kind of dialectic movement between Sneha and her beloved friend Tig that could show how they learn from each other, how they form each other, how both their minds–and Thom’s–create the tangible collective project that shapes the novel’s finale. 

I didn’t read so many of the authors I love, from Ferrante to Morrison to Munro to Roy, looking for likeability in the characters. I read them, and so much else, to feel transported, to feel a world and a consciousness opening up for me, to feel deep pleasure, to feel a goddamn mind at work. That’s what preoccupied me, really, when writing: the desire–tbh the fervent, embarrassing prayer–to make a world and a voice that could stay with a reader, assuming I would ever have readers at all.  

M:  We’re inching dangerously close to the Substack length limit, but I have one last thing I want to ask. I graduated from college around the same time as Sneha, 2013, so the technological landscape of this novel felt so nostalgic and familiar to me (ATCDB is set in Milwaukee from 2012 to 2013). Craigslist Personals make an appearance, so does the OkCupid website. There are multiple scenes where Sneha is stranded or dependent on a friend for a ride, which couldn’t happen if the story was set a year or two later and she had the option to Uber. A lot of authors struggle to incorporate texting and cell phones in their work because that technology can be so consuming and all-powerful, or remove the need for actual interactions between characters. Do you think it was easier to negotiate this in 2012 as opposed to say, if ATCBD took place in 2022? Was there anything you included and then realized was anachronistic?

S: Lol nice clocking of OKCupid there. Yeah, the relatively frictionless world of ~the apps~ can often pose a meaningful challenge to the writer of fiction—a surmountable challenge, and one I’ve sometimes seen handled beautifully. I find myself often really needing constraints to work on the characters, if I’m trying to make plot happen–you’re absolutely right about how Uber being widespread would have changed the story entirely. I found myself googling a lot about when exactly Tinder/OKCupid/Uber/Lyft were introduced and then massified into non Bay-area cities, and choosing my plot timelines in part to try not to fall too much afoul of that. So not too many anachronisms that I remember. Basically, what I needed to make happen in the world of these characters was for them to need each other and call upon each other and share care and resources in frank, fumbling, unmediated ways. App-based convenience tech was, and is, an obstacle to that. 🐉

All This Could Be Different is available from your local library or bookstore. Read the first chapter here and subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter,

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