There is a moment during our hour-long Zoom call when Huma Qureshi and I simultaneously pick up our pens after Avni Doshi says, “I’m always looking for psychic autonomy on the page.” We scribble a couple of words, then look up at each other and grin. “Did you write ‘psychic autonomy’ too?” I ask the actor, who beams back at me and says, “That’s why you need to hang out with good writers. I’m always noting down the things they say. ‘Psychic auto is such a beautiful turn of phrase.”
Doshi can’t brush off this compliment even if she wants to. It’s how writers are built. We labour over a single sentence for so many hours, and just when we think we’re satisfied, an alternative path emerges. To be told that the destination at the end of that circuitous detour was worth the motion sickness it took to get there is what people like Doshi, one-book-old Qureshi and I live for.
Huma Qureshi’s debut book emerged from bouts of purging during the pandemic, when her thoughts had no place to go but the page. Photographed by Marco Bahler.
Six years after her debut novel Burnt Sugar was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doshi returns to the page for another hit of that writer’s high. In conversation with Vogue India, Qureshi, who became a debut author in 2023 with Zeba, and Doshi, just weeks from the launch of her upcoming divorce novel The First House, talk about their creative process, men who fail and women who rise in their stead.
Vogue India: After your debut about a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, what made you want to tackle the disintegration of a marriage?
Avni Doshi: It wasn’t that I wanted to tackle divorce, but I felt like I had reached this midlife moment and was surrounded by women who were all entering a kind of crisis alongside me. I thought, I’ve lived a particular life up until this point, I’ve ticked all the boxes I was meant to tick, but who am I and why have I done this? I find a crisis is often the place where these vital moments of interrogation begin.
Vogue India: Huma, the eponymous protagonist of your debut novel, Zeba, also experiences an identity crisis before finding her calling as a superhero. How did she come to you?
Huma Qureshi: I’m not a traditional writer like you, Avni. I just had all this time during Covid and didn’t know what to do with my thoughts. I find writing to be extremely therapeutic. More than therapeutic, it’s selfish. It’s more for myself and how to navigate what’s happening inside me. Waking up on pandemic mornings and doing my pages felt like purging. I didn’t know whether they would become a book, a screenplay or a journal I would eventually burn.
