Malavika Kannan on growing up and belonging

What comes first: experience or narrative? How do you write yourself into existence? How do our relationships evolve over time?

These are a few of the many questions posed by Malavika Kannan in her latest work of literary fiction, Unprecedented Times (out now), a queer campus coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows 18-year-old Rishi Kumar, a burnt-out climate activist who leaves behind Florida—a place where you can’t tell the difference between fireworks, bullets, and rain—with the goal of living a life worth writing about. 

I sat down with Kannan to learn more about embracing queer joy, how this book explores love and relationships in all forms, and how both she and Rishi make meaning of their lives through writing.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Aleenah Ansari: How did Unprecedented Times come to be?
Malavika Kannan: Like many writers, I’m a reader first. During the pandemic, I was reading contemporary literature by women of color, including the campus novel and the young woman’s coming-of-age novel. I wanted to write a novel in that tradition. I also believed that the collective experience of COVID-19—both for the world and queer Gen Z people—felt very specific and interesting, and I thought it was something people would want to see rendered in literature. 

Even the title Unprecedented Times is meant to be a bit ironic because the gag is that nothing about this is unprecedented. But there are specific generational experiences that the book does take interest in such as the pandemic, the decline of the American Empire in the 21st Century, and climate change.

AA: What are some of the questions you wanted to pose to the reader?
MK: One question that the book asks, even if it doesn’t have answers for, is, “What do young women do about men?” There are not a lot of close male characters in the book, but you see Rishi’s sexuality unfold on the page as she comes to terms with the idea that she considers herself empowered, and considers herself to have unprecedented degrees of social privilege with regard to her gender, but finds herself hitting the hard limits of what that offers to her in her dealings with men.

The book also asks—which was posed by Stacey Yu, the author of Kitten—“Which comes first, experience or narrative?” Rishi asks if she can control the outcome of her life, and if she’s telling a story that isn’t true as it’s happening. In other words, what degree of agency do we have as women and as people?

Another question is, “What do we owe each other?” Rishi is untangling the question of what a friend owes her versus her family. What is your relationship with your best friend supposed to be like, as opposed to your lover, as opposed to your mother? For queer people and for first-generation Americans and for so many people, there's no clear answer.

AA: Tell me more about the relationships explored in this book, whether it’s Rishi’s relationship with her friends, mother, and others.
MK: I knew I wanted to write a big ensemble queer friend group. Many female protagonists in the genre of contemporary angsty young woman literature tend to be lonely and have no friends, which is not true to my experience. I love that so much of the book feels like a group project, and so much of the book is rendered as conversations between Rishi and her friends, as well as the women she’s obsessed with.

The relationship with her parents is one of the biggest parts of the book. Rishi is at an age when her parents stop being her only model for how to live. Rishi doesn’t get to know her parents as people and is often dismissive of them. Even though Rishi is the narrator and controlling the story, I want readers to have moments where they disagree with her. I also hope that readers see her parents’ humanity, even if Rishi can’t see it. There’s a point where Rishi realizes there is no guidebook for her parents.

AA: How would you describe the relationship between Rishi and Georgia?
MK: I had the most fun writing scenes between Rishi and Georgia, who is described as Rishi’s first best friend. They are each other’s first window into another way of living, and they are both each other’s first responders and co-journeyers as they navigate their sexuality and what kind of contributions they want to make to the world. For a character like Rishi, who is described as never having people who felt the same intensity towards the world as she does, it means a lot to have a friend who is a child of CDC employees who is also trying to fight climate change. At one point, Rishi describes her friendship with Georgia as like keeping a diary, and that she just has someone keeping the score at her side at all times.

AA: How did you ensure that this story highlights queer joy?
MK: The humor and joy in this book come from the swag that the queer characters bring to their lives, even in conditions of confusion and hardship. Rishi and her friends can always make a bad situation funny just by describing it to each other. I also wanted to show these young people having a good time.

AA: What does representation in media mean to you, and how does that show up in this book?
MK: I realized that a lot of young women, especially young women of color, turn to literature and media not just to be entertained, but to be represented well and see themselves represented. They’re asking if they’d want to be friends with these characters, or if they’re a model of possibility for them. 

One fictional character I think about a lot as a sort of cousin to Rishi is the protagonist of Mindy Kaling’s show, Never Have I Ever. She’s also a badly behaved grieving young woman, and people hated her. When I saw how people responded to that fictional character, I got a sense of what was coming for me. My goal is not to write a fictional friend for people, but to tell a story of what it’s like to be a young person, and I hope the story is entertaining and makes people laugh a little bit.

AA: How do you, and Rishi, make meaning of your lives through writing? Did it help you understand your life more deeply?
MK: I’m open to the possibility that writing through things isn’t always the healthy way of processing life, but it’s the one that I’ve had my whole life. As someone who takes the practice of keeping a diary very seriously and has made a career writing about life around us, I find myself curious about understanding why things are the way they are and if it’s always been this way. I don’t know if this helps me. There’s a joke in this book that knowledge and self-awareness are a curse and don’t necessarily translate into agency. Having language to describe her experiences to a fault doesn’t make Rishi more adequately prepared to deal with her experiences. 

One of the heavier themes of the book is that Rishi feels like she’s going into a sexual landscape where she’s empowered in her dealings with men because she’s a feminist and has come up in an era of sex positivity, but she finds her experience with men to be recurrently bruising and traumatizing in a one-sided way. It’s a moment where having language doesn’t translate to having power. That seems to be the symptom of the moment. Tools like the Internet give us ample opportunities for expression. Many of us can articulate our beliefs on a variety of issues and theorize about them quite well, but that doesn't translate into electoral victory. The relationship between speech and power in this country has not felt this hopeless in a while. The characters can say the right thing and have the language, but they don't necessarily have power as a result.

AA: How do you want readers to feel when they check out your book?
MK: I did not write a book that keeps the reader at arm’s length. Instead, I wanted to let them into Rishi’s thought process and psyche, and I hope it inspires people to think about themselves and their own friendships. I also hope it gives people who identify with Rishi a feeling of tenderness or being seen.