Basran needed space to create new novel
Chronicle of loss and family had to wait while she gained distance from her own mother’s death
Someone You Love is Gone By Gurjinder Basran Viking Canada
In order to write her new novel, Someone You Love is Gone, Gurjinder Basran had to put the project aside for a few years.
The novel focuses on a middle-aged Indo-Canadian woman named Simran as she deals with the death of her mother, her dying marriage, her complicated siblings and a distant daughter.
Sadly for Basran, the death of a mother was something she became very familiar with.
“Because of the circumstances of my mother’s illness and her death, I was far too close to the subject matter to be able to write,” said Basran, who has two teenage children. “I just needed lots of time to process and get some perspective. Be thoughtful about the things that were happening.”
While Basran and her family dealt with their grief, the writer in her still managed to store away content for future use.
“Although I wasn’t actually physically writing I was certainly always thinking,” said Basran, a graduate of the creative-writing program at Simon Fraser University.
The time away from the actual writing of the book allowed her to draw on her own feelings, but in a less personal way. So when she returned to the book in 2015, she was ready and managed to finish the manuscript in a year.
Someone You Love is Gone is a touching, interesting look at a family’s ups-and-downs and generational connections.
In the novel, Simran is desperately trying to find out why things ended up the way they did. She is searching for a through line to help her understand and accept her own life?
Basran very effectively breaks the book up into chapters headed Before, now and then.
Like a waft of incense being drawn out of an open window, the time shifts gently find their way into the subconscious of the story and question how much the past informs the present?
“Time is so linear, we believe that we are born, all these things happen and then we die. And yet when you really think about what happens it is really based on these pivot points,” said Basran. “So I really wanted to play with the idea of how we experience time. We don’t think about all the things that happen to us — we just think about now, the pivotal moments now. I wanted to bring in the before because I think there are things that happen to our loved ones even before we are an idea — that, whether we realize it or not, changes our lives. Even though we are not even conceived, it’s going to have a big impact on us.
“Also I don’t think we know our parents. We don’t think of our parents as people or our grandparents as people you know who have hopes and dreams and loved and were loved. So, I wanted to explore that with the before,” added Basran.
Basran’s first award-winning book, Everything Was Good-Bye, was very much a look at cultural identity. What it was like growing up as an Indo-Canadian kid in North Delta. This time out she is narrowing her focus away from the meaning of life to what she says is “the meaning of a life.”
That change-up of tone is something Basran admits makes for some anxiety as the book’s drop date nears.
“Yes, I’m a bit nervous about it,” said Basran. “It’s a really big departure from the last book as far as tone and character. It is not as funny, certainly not lighthearted.”