Tahmima Anam

Tahmima Anam initially didn’t want to put her own name on her latest novel, said Terry Gross in NPR.org. The 45-year-old author, a native of Bangladesh who was raised in New York City and now lives in London, worried that a cutting satire about tech culture would destroy the reputation for serious historical fiction she had built with A Golden Age, The Good Muslim, and The Bones of Grace. But she had married a man who launched a tech startup and she’d been taking notes on tech’s bro culture for years. “One of the great pleasures of being a writer is that you get to put all of your experiences somewhere,” she says. “So anytime someone cut me off or didn’t take me seriously, I thought, I’m going to write that down.” When The Startup Wife was finished, she decided that a pseudonym wasn’t necessary.

Anam concedes that she put more of herself in the new book, said Liesl Schillinger in TheGuardian.com. The sassiness and coarse language of the protagonist came naturally once Anam loosened up. “There was something extremely liberating about writing this book,” she says. Even more fun was dreaming up fictional startups and the central premise: a Bangladeshi-American woman who creates a quasispiritual app, makes her

WASP husband the face of the operation, then watches as he becomes a messiah figure. In at least one sense, the story isn’t a total departure for Anam. “I’ve always been interested in women finding their voices and taking charge of their lives,” she says. “One can address hard-hitting themes with a lighter touch—it doesn’t take anything away from the moral urgency of the story.”