Author Spotlight: Sejal Shah Artifacts Poetic Images, Myths, and Memories in “How to Make Your Mother Cry”

On a Friday morning in April, I steeled myself in front of my laptop’s webcam as dancer, artist, educator, writer, and poet Sejal Shah logged on to our virtual meeting. Donning a brightly patterned top with her hair tossed behind her shoulders, Shah greeted me warmly with a smile.

Earlier this year, I was given an advanced copy of Shah’s first collection of fiction, How to Make Your Mother Cry, released on May 1. This is a body of short stories — comprising poetic images Shah calls artifacts. Other ingredients that made these stories are something between myths and memories.

How to Make Your Mother Cry is what I call a treasure chest of old memories that have not seen sunlight until you, the reader, unlock them and set them free. It is a collection of short stories that read like poetry, and you do not have to start from the beginning. (Though, I highly recommend starting with the first story, “The Girl with Two Brothers.”) 

These poetic pages help reshape our perception of what it means to be a people. And for Shah, specifically, How to Make Your Mother Cry is her way of experimenting ways to visualize girls and, as she describes it, women standing in front of “expectations, limitations, and challenges of becoming the heroine of their own lives.”

EnVi spoke with Shah about her new book, How to Make Your Mother Cry, and the experiences that made it.

We Are Our Own Heroes

While each story in How to Make Your Mother Cry can stand on its own in narrative and plot, they all sail toward a common theme: how we build relationships or dismantle them with other people. Two fictions in particular, “The Girl with Two Brothers” and title story “How to Make Your Mother Cry,” demonstrate these themes of interpersonal culture.

Liu: Right off the bat, the first story, “The Girl with Two Brothers,” is gripping and provocative. And a repeated line haunted me as I read this story: “No one saves anyone.” What inspired this line? And how did you want readers to perceive this statement?

Shah: “No one saves anyone” is a warning. When working on these stories, I thought of all the fairytales and fables that came with lessons to be learned. The big brothers serve as these “protectors,” but do they really protect the protagonist, the little sister?

Liu: I think about my own little sister and wonder if I am doing enough — or too much — for her, to protect her. But I find myself sometimes wanting my little sister to protect me or letting her. 

Shah: It’s funny you say that, because I am interested in sibling relationships and their stories. We simply don’t see as much of it (brother and sister sibling relationships) in literature and film.

Liu: I agree. Especially in Asian American spaces, I’ve noticed more authors say something similar — how we don’t often see a truer or more realistic representation of Asian or Asian American siblinghood.

Shah: Thank you for expanding this conversation into Asian American narratives, because I do see myself as an Asian American author, but that’s not always communicated through publication, as an Indian American or Gujarati woman.

We often think about relationships in terms of love or friendship, and familial relationships tend to take a backseat in these conversations. It’s not that we don’t think of them as relationships, but because these are the relationships that are given to us — ingrained in our identities — and not relationships we go out of our way to discover, develop, and maintain. And Shah’s simple yet cutting words, “No one saves anyone,” is a reminder that we are our own heroes. While it’s a bonus that we may have people in our lives who will choose to save us and protect us, no one can truly save anyone. We save ourselves.

For Mothers and Daughters

We pivoted to the story that ultimately became the book title, “How to Make Your Mother Cry.” Here, Shah tells the story of a young woman entering adulthood who reflects on her relationship with her mother — someone who has clearly walked a different path in life than the daughter’s. In this short story, the narrator — the daughter — is speaking to a writing teacher: “This was the prompt you gave to our writing class: Who knows how to make love stay? This was the question I answered instead: Who knows how to make her mother cry? I do. After you left, I did” (65).

“Why was this choice important to you as an author?” I asked. The “you” in this narrative clearly points at the writing teacher, but this device also opens up a portal to the person reading this text.

“I wrote ‘How to Make Your Mother Cry’ in 2000. The second-person POV invites readers in, and it allows this particular story to speak to an implied audience. It also just felt right to me at the time,” Shah replied.

Notably in this short, Shah builds a list of ways to “make your mother cry” (68). Starting this list off is “Stop eating.” Then, followed by actions that many daughters of immigrant families can gut-wrenchingly relate: “Cut your hair so that she has nothing to braid, so that she can no longer say that you look like her.” 

I sat with this third item on the list for a while. Perhaps there is an unspoken debt that Shah is pointing at — something that many first-generation immigrant children understand all too well. To look or resemble your parents is almost a type of burden, that requires the child to unendingly owe the parent who birthed her. In the context of the meaning of hair, it can be said that our hair is an extension of our lineage. Something that connects us to our roots. And cutting it metaphors the severance of the connection to the lineage — the control the parent has over her. And thus, a blow that would surely make a mother cry. But it is also important to note that this is no fault of the daughter.

Shah then dished a little-kept secret about How to Make Your Mother Cry: “The Half King was originally going to be the title of [this] collection, but we ended up going with How to Make Your Mother Cry because it was provocative, and I didn’t want to focus on the romance in the collection. And ‘The Half King’ is a romance.” 

Shah was right. How to Make Your Mother Cry as the title of this collection vividly captures the essence of this body of works — a treasure chest of stories about people, relationships, and the memories that linger between over time.

Poetic Pauses & Intermissions

Readers of How to Make Your Mother Cry will quickly notice breaths between each fiction — sometimes between words or pages. These almost-whimsical breaths are images and letters that spine this book. Careful readers will recognize this technique from American poet and essayist Claudia Rankine, who popularized this method of mixing images with poetry — and words.

Shah calls them artifacts, these photographs and illustrations — and letters. There is an alluring quality to the letters that are inserted between each story, culminating in what makes this book whole.

“Were there any parts of this book that you think were drawn from your appreciation for Rankine?” I asked. Shah, with a soft gleam in her eyes, pointed to a shelf that I cannot see from the frame of her webcam in our Zoom call. On that shelf are a few of Rankine’s works. “I definitely felt influenced by Rankine in many ways. I was reading a lot of her work, such as Just Us, Citizen, and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. I love how she uses images in her writing — something so powerful and interesting. It led me to think about the relationship between text and image — even objects. And this exploration of objects and text and images are also shown in my essay, “Ring Theory.” I see objects and images in How to Make Your Mother Cry as my own artifacts and poetic pauses,” said Shah.

Poetic pauses. This term stuck with me. I paused, too, before continuing. This moment — this idea of a poetic pause — sparked an epitome in our conversation. Adjusting my sitting position, I quickly but casually tell her, “That’s so coincidental that you call your images poetic pauses, because I actually noticed the letters you inserted in How to Make Your Mother Cry and I have been calling them ‘intermissions’ between each story. I call them intermissions, because they provide a little breathing room for me as a reader.” Then, I asked, “Could you peel back the curtains and share a bit about these intermission letters?”

Perhaps it’s because we’re both scholars. Shah’s eyes beamed for a moment before she grabbed a pencil and started writing something down. “I love that you call them intermissions. I wrote it down. Thank you for saying that,” she said.

“At one point, these letters were all part of one story. I submitted it for a writing contest, which had a minimum page requirement in the content. I decided to divide the letters up, each on their own pages, in order to make the required page count. I liked the effect of these letters as an ongoing secondary narrative threaded through the stories and kept that structure even when the manuscript did not win the contest,” said Shah, laughing.

There is this air of mystery and allure when it comes to reading these letters between each story. These letters are written to an English teacher by a middle schooler, but there’s a hint of admiration — adoration, even. Unable to shake off this feeling of adoration, I asked if she could give readers some insight on her writing process behind these letters.

Pondering an answer just briefly before speaking, Shah said, “As a teacher, I still keep in touch with some of my former students, years later. And I think these relationships are sacred, because you don’t see this relationship anywhere else. Mr. Bird, the teacher in these short letters, is based on someone real, a teacher I once had for seventh grade English. These letters symbolize these relationships that are so sacred. It’s adoration with an appropriate distance. I think about journals, especially journals that students write in class and teachers read.”

The Artifacts

Artifacts and objects in Shah’s book move between words. Sometimes, they are vividly printed on the pages, and other times, they are converted into words that ignite new stories. For instance, “Mary, Staring At Me” is a riveting tale of two women — one who is drawn to the other, with the looming, invisible fear that others would find out about them.

I was reading “Mary, Staring at Me” on the slowly crawling New York City bus, and this short story made me blush. Shah is so meticulous with how imagery activates our senses. And it starts with the idea of a key and lock. “Did this girl have an antique dresser with a lock? And did she string the key on a ribbon? Was it a white silk ribbon—was it a slender key?” Shah begins these new pages with a series of questions, as if we, too, are trying to find these answers with her.

“I first started with images and objects. I was a poet before ever being an essayist or fiction writer. So in ‘Mary,’ we start with a key. And this came from a lesson I learned in graduate school as a creative writer. ‘What are the objects you start with in your writing? This or these object(s) have to continue with the rest of the story — in this case, it is the key,” said Shah.

Fascinated by her explanation about the key, we went on to discuss how something as simple as a key has transformed the story into something so compelling. For Shah, this key creates tension, metaphorically and visually. “Everyone wants a key that opens nothing” (24).

Readers follow the protagonist as she explores the many openings and closings of life. There’s an element of undressing — undoing of one’s clothing — in a scene, where her friend Angela “pours cured sesame oil on [her], and it slips toward [her] lowest back, to the bones that form a bowl, to the bones that argue beneath the skin.” Following that, “Take your shirt off…” (26). In this scene, the image of the key continues to drift in my mind, an object that can unravel secrets but also lock them up at the same time. The presence of the biblical Mary, a holy figure from a religion that often shuns homosexuality as lesser and evil, is haunting throughout this tale.  “I can read Angela’s eyes and we will not kiss like this again” (29). As much as the protagonist is excited by the thrill between Angela and her, this looming image of Mary reduces the woman to a girl again — barred from exploring her sexuality, because she was taught not to.

One Way to Decolonize the English Language

There is something so alluring about Shah’s writing style, as seen in “Mary, Staring At Me.” She easily dances between fiction and objects and memories. One way she does it so well is through the elimination of quotation marks. Doing so opens up the narrative a little more, inviting readers into her treasure chest of things. This unique, and brave, choice may not have been something Shah was aware of, but it afforded me a space to ask, “Could the absence of quotation marks be a choice made on your part to center disability visibility — that perhaps the absence of the quotation marks is an indication that the narrators of each story are speaking but not particularly through spoken words?”

“Wow, that is a rather fascinating insight that I haven’t thought of, but it very much represents a lot of what I believe,” Shah replied, surprised — that makes two of us. She paused briefly before continuing.

“Something as small as the absence of quotation marks comes from poetry and innovative fiction. I believe punctuation has a lot of power, but there’s often a normalized way of seeing or using them. Thank you for pointing this out to me. I think it is always important to unpack received ways of using punctuation,” she said. There was a glimmer in her eyes before she mentioned Susan Steinberg and how the American author had written about the use of punctuation in Steinberg’s work. “It’s all part of decolonizing the English language and its structures and rules. Having no quotation marks is one way to decolonize the language,” Shah concluded.

How to Make Your Mother Cry embodies the rich essences of narratives, the fiction genre, images and objects, and myths that were once seedlings within Sejal Shah. Though it sometimes reads as poetry and other times as prose, the aromatic pockets of romance, girlhood, siblinghood, parenthood, and how a girl can navigate womanhood in different ways are a constant reminder that this body of work cannot be categorized. This is a chimera of short fiction, rich in important stories for women and girls, mothers and daughters.

How to Make Your Mother Cry is available to purchase wherever you buy books. Keep up with Sejal Shah and her upcoming bodies of work on her website, Instagram, and X.

Want to read more author interviews? Check out our conversation with cartoonist and illustrator Yao Xiao here!