Author Alka Joshi Shares Inspiration for Book Series at Peninsula Center Library on March 15 By Writer and Contributor Emily McGinn
Alka Joshi, author of the bestselling Jaipur Trilogy, will be visiting the Peninsula Center Library on March 15 at 6 pm. Joshi gained international acclaim for her debut novel “The Henna Artist,” which quickly climbed to the New York Times bestseller list, and she has written two more books in the series, “The Secret Keeper of Jaipur” and “The Perfumist of Paris.” Now, Netflix is transforming “The Henna Artist” into a television series and Joshi is at work on her next novel.
Alka Joshi
Although Joshi has gained success as a full-time author, she initially did not intend to write novels. In fact, she had a whole career running her own advertising and marketing agency prior to becoming an author. However, her husband encouraged her to pursue fiction writing, and when the economy plummeted in 2008 because of the recession and her clients’ businesses stumbled, Joshi took the plunge. She enrolled in an MFA program for creative writing and began to write.
During that time, Joshi was also connecting more with her roots. She would regularly travel to India, where she was born, with her mother and during those trips, her mother would introduce her to new places in the country and different aspects of Indian culture. Her mother opened up about her life, including her inability to satisfy her desire to continue with her education because she was expected to go through with an arranged marriage and start a family
“Her life was never her own,” Joshi says. “She did not get to go back to college or to have a career, but I realized she had always fought really hard for me to have exactly the life that she could not have. I chose my own partner, I chose my own career, I chose everything I wanted to do in my life and she never interfered. So I thought, I really need to pay tribute to this woman who had an enormous amount of courage, given the strict upbringing she had, to allow her children to do whatever their hearts desired.”
Joshi’s mother inspired the protagonist of “The Henna Artist,” which follows the life of a young woman making her own way in Jaipur, India, in the 1950s. Joshi aimed to give this character the freedom in life that her mother could not experience.
But as Joshi finished her MFA program, her mother passed away, and a piece of what drove Josh to write disappeared with her. With the subject of her initial inspiration gone and the economy recovering from the recession, Joshi pulled away from creative writing and returned to her day job. However, one of her program instructors sent her novel along to an agent, and the agent expressed interest.
For the next six years, Joshi continued to work with editors on “The Henna Artist.” Finally, she scored a great contract with a publisher. Once it hit the markets in 2020, her book, which was nearly a decade in the making, was a hit. At that moment, Joshi knew she was going to leave her marketing career behind and jump into life as a full-time author.
Joshi originally had not planned to transform her standalone novel into a trilogy, but she realized there were more stories to tell that had not fit into the pages of “The Henna Artist.” Each book in the trilogy shares the story of a different major character in the series.
“The second book came about because one of the characters from ‘The Henna Artist’ kept insisting that I write his story,” Joshi says. “Over the ten years that it took me to write ‘The Henna Artist,’ I had developed such an understanding of the characters, they almost became my family. So they actually started directing the narrative.”
Joshi emphasizes India as a central location in each of her novels. She highlights her birthplace in her work because she feels that it is underappreciated for its contributions to the world, from its role in many common fragrances to its spiritual connection to the natural world.
As she writes, she aims to learn more about her birthplace and culture while also exploring the nature of people and her own growth as a writer. She enjoys developing deep relationships with her characters and understanding interactions between the characters she generates.
“I have so many stories in my head that I need to get out,” Joshi says. “My husband was right all along. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He said, ‘You tell really great stories.’ And I had never thought of myself as a storyteller.”
Like most writers, Joshi has encountered some obstacles in her writing career. Although the promotional and entrepreneurial aspects of the book business came easily to her, she has learned that she must be patient as a writer and has had to overcome insecurities about whether or not others will find her writing interesting.
“The obstacles were largely self-created,” Joshi says. “It’s knowing that you have to keep persevering whether you want to or not, that you have to keep writing another draft and another draft just to get it to the point where your agent thinks it’s good enough to send to a publisher. That takes time.”
Beyond sharing interesting stories embedded in Indian culture, Joshi aims to inspire women through her work and her characters. This is especially important to her as she hopes to display what women can accomplish through her own life. As an author who did not start writing novels until she was in her fifties, she hopes that her own story will encourage women to realize they can always pursue something new, regardless of age.
“My first and foremost message is that every woman deserves the right to determine her own destiny, to make the choices that she wants to make, to live the life that she wants to live,” Joshi says. “I want to show examples of those kinds of women in my stories that I hope will inspire other women to do what they really want to do in their lives.”
Currently, Joshi is working on her fourth and fifth novels, also set in India.
“What a gift it is that my imagination had been holding on to so much for so long and it just needed a push to get out of my head and onto a piece of paper,” Joshi says.
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