Books: Half Life, Run Away from Home
Farooki’s Half Life, the ghosts of your past come back to make you face your demons *** 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
Farooki’s Half Life explores running away from home as an adult
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 7/20/2010 – “I wondered what it would be like to be a grown-up woman who was running away from home, rather than trudging back,” says Half Life author Roopa Farooki. “I wondered where this woman would go, and exactly where she was running to. This led to the opening scene of Half Life, where Aruna walks out of her home and on her marriage in the middle of breakfast, and the rest of the story developed from there.”
Farooki’s narrative is reminiscent of Amy Tan’s writing. Written in first person, the narrative jumps from person to person. Bengali doctor Aruna Ahmed Jones marries a British physician hoping to forget a tragic romance with her childhood friend Ejaz Jazz Ahsan. Mentally unstable, Aruna leaves Jazz in Singapore’s Little India. When she arrives in London to stay with a friend she starts taking drugs to cope with the trauma of the miscarriages she’s had.
“The idea for Half Life came to me when I was traveling home late one night after promoting Corner Shop at a literary festival,” says Farooki. “The train home had taken several hours, and it was long past midnight and pouring with rain as I finally arrived at the station. As I walked back to my house through an autumnal sludge of puddles, concrete, leaves and mud, I felt curiously disconnected and alone, as though I didn’t have a family sleeping soundly in a warm house after all.”
“The whole experience of writing Half Life was strange…like being hijacked in a storm,” says Farooki. “When I wrote the first chapter, I had no idea of where it would lead. But, once I had started, I just couldn’t stop. For the months that I was writing it, I was so obsessed with the idea, so afraid of losing momentum, that I did almost nothing else. I barely ate or slept, and lost a lot of weight. My only break from writing was to look after my two little boys in the afternoons, but once they were in bed at 7pm, I would go back to writing until the early hours of the morning, and then get back up at 7am and carry on.”
A few months after finishing the first draft of Half Life, Farooki discovered she was pregnant with twins. “I now have two gorgeous baby girls who are just a few months old, so between them and my two boys, finding time to write is a challenge.”
Farooki says she did a lot of research on bipolar disorder, a condition that affects one of the characters in her book. She also researched the book’s locations.
“Although I used places I know quite well…London, Singapore, Malaysia, I felt I had to get the details just right,” says Farooki. “I went to Singapore and visited all the places mentioned in the novel so that everything I wrote about would ring true for a local. I also had some historical research to do, as one of the strands of the story takes place in Calcutta just after the Second World War, and covers the period of Indian Independence and Partition.”
Farooki found her publisher first, then her agent. “I had been shortlisted in a competition run by Pan Macmillan, and when they saw the manuscript for my first novel, Bitter Sweets, they gave me an offer almost immediately.” Foarooki immediately contacted all the agencies who were in the process of considering the manuscript, eventually signing with Aitken Alexander at Aitken Alexander Associates.
Farooki says that of her four novels, Half Life is most suited to be adapted to the screen, as the action takes place in just three days and a lot of the imagery is very visual. So far, Half Life has not been optioned for TV or film.
Half Life reveals how the ghosts of your past can come back and haunt you, that you must face your demons. The story moves from London to Singapore.
Half Life by Roopa Farooki
Hardcover: 272 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; 1 edition (April 27, 2010), Language: English, ISBN: 9780312577902