Category: Musings
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Saturday Morning
I have been writing this series in my head for six weeks. In the time it has taken to draft, the conversation about writers and AI has broken open in public. I do not know how the conversation will sound by the time these posts have all been published. It is Saturday morning. I carry…
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Nobody Asked Us
I wrote Hindsight because I needed to understand something. Not to resolve it. Not to arrive at an answer I could hand to a reader neatly wrapped. I needed to understand what it costs a woman to build a life on a story she was never given in full.
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Half of Us
The survey landed in February. One thousand Indian Americans, asked to describe their lives in this country. The Carnegie Endowment published the numbers, and I read them the way I read most things about us: looking for the part they got wrong, and the part they got right. One in two reported experiencing discrimination in…
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My First AI Boo Boo
I should have known better. I am, after all, the woman who slid down a snowy road and walked up to her home in a snow storm. The pattern is clear: Lakshmi plus technology plus overconfidence equals wreckage. Here is what happened. I was redesigning my website. The plan was simple. Consolidate everything on Substack…
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What the machine finds, and what it cannot
The prologue of my memoir is five sentences long. Two paragraph-sized fragments, separated by a row of dots. A family in a restaurant turns to look at us. I hold the woman’s eyes for a moment and look away. I wish I could tell them our story. Then a section break. Then: That is the…
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The Folder Named Essays
The folder on my desktop is named Essays. Two decades of a blog, poured into one container and set in front of me to be judged. I opened it sometime last month with the intention of finding a book. What I found instead was a woman I had mostly forgotten: twenty-five, new to Pennsylvania, writing…
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I Timed This Deliberately
BTS releases Arirang today. Their first full album in nearly four years. The comeback the fandom has been waiting for. My novel, A Star Keeps Its Distance, is free on Kindle today through March 24. In June 2023, I wrote a post here called “Baby ARMY Steps.” I was a middle-aged woman walking around her…
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Agency in a Restricted World: A Deep Dive into Love Story in the 1970s
On the surface, Love Story in the 1970s is a simple tale: Fei Ni is hell-bent on attending college, and Mu Yang is ready to support the love of his life through every detour. Set in China beginning in 1975, the series follows these two protagonists as they navigate their early twenties in a country…
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Felix And His Leaves
I step out into the wind and cold, suitably armed. I have a sage green zip up jacket with a heavy hood. A black puffer jacket over it, also with the hood on, gloves on my hands and boots on my feet. Felix has his blue harness on and he zips right past me the…
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The Inevitability Of AI
My social media feed is filled with pictures of V (BTS member) with a fan. Comments range from “how lucky!?” to “this is AI”. I peer closely at the picture as if I can discern the difference. I conclude it is not and move on. Also on my feed are screenshots from the Epstein files.…