YouSaid · the spoken record

Megha Majumdar

lines on the record: 37
first: 2025-10-14
most recent: 2025-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exactly. Oprah. It was a Saturday. And I think, you know, I was trying to make sure my son doesn't watch more than one hour of cartoons or something like that. And here was this phone call. It was completely wild. But yeah, your brain can get so consumed by our immediate concerns and that becomes life. And once you think about, well, that's not all there is to my life. I want to think about bigger questions. I want to think about beauty and joy and morals, what is the right way to live? I want to think about all of these questions which are not pressing in my everyday But at the end of my life, when I look back on my life, I want to know that I sat with these questions, I asked these questions. And writing is a way to ask those questions.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I loved writing. I would always get sent as a representative of the school to essay competitions and creative writing competitions. But I don't think I knew that you could write full-time and that could be the way for you to live your life. I don't think I really knew that. But writing, you know, it was a way for me to play at first and it stayed away for me to play for a long time until I realized well writing is a way for me to Access something bigger than my own life. You know, it is so easy, especially now with two kids to have a life where my brain is completely consumed by the logistics of my life. Preschool and meals and that's why when I called you.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a quiet kid who loved to read, I loved reading Nancy Drew, and hardy boys and Sherlock Holmes. I read a lot of mysteries. So I was this quiet kid who studied hard and read a lot of books.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. I think a lot about, I think we were all taught as kids, be honest, tell the truth. This is what will get you far. This is what is rewarded. And then we grow up and we see that the people in power do not live that way at all. The people who triumph in our society, the ones who consolidate power, Are not the people who are telling the truth and serving others. And I think a lot about how do we live with that contradiction? What does it mean then to be an honest person? What do you gain from being honest or is it completely the wrong way to think about gain in relation to honesty? Does it give you something greater and more truthful to yourself? So I don't know that I have found any answers, but these are the questions that intrigue me.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It felt inevitable to me. I felt that it had to happen this way. That was the most truthful place for the story to go. And once something about the story reveals itself as inevitable and truthful to you, you kind of feel like you have to obey it.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a while I was working with a completely different plot. So for a while, no, I thought the end would be very different. The characters were very different. But when I became a mom and then became more interested in Ma and I found the true shape of this book, then yes, I did find this ending. And I feel that some writers kind of work their way through a book and they get to the ending when the ending presents itself, but I need to know what that final emotional note is going to be because it helps me orient the whole book toward that moment.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had that moment of America slipping through my fingers. I thought I worked so hard. I got into this dream school and now I'm not going to be able to go because I'm not going to get a visa. And I stood there before her completely powerless. There was nothing I could do. It was her decision to grant me the visa or not. And I stood there before her and she did something else with the paperwork. She looked at it again, and somehow she changed her mind and she decided to grant me the visa so I could come here and study, but that moment of you work so hard for something and somebody else's decision something else which is a factor completely outside your control can't take it away from you. I think it shows up in our lives in many different ways.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The emotions that I was drawing on actually came, I don't think I've ever really talked about this, but I got into Harvard from India and I was so excited over the moon. I went to the consulate for my visa interview and the consular officer said, you are not eligible for a visa because you're getting so much financial aid.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And fiction becomes then a space to sit with those contradictions, to understand that the truth is not in this answer or that answer, but in that space where nothing can be resolved, and you live with that, Crowd of unresolved questions, but you live with them while acknowledging them, and that acknowledgement, that space of being truthful that they exist, these are contradictions. This is how I live. That space feels very fruitful for fiction.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi. To me, the story really spoke to the ideas of fierce love and unrelenting hope. And so Megan, I wonder, you know, your writing is just so beautiful and lyrical, but yet you left a lot of things kind of not neatly tied up. And so I felt like I had to sit in this discomfort while I was contemplating, you know, these unexpected things that occur in life and all of its complexities. How does that come to you as you sit to write? Fiction helps me think about those contradictions and that space of unease and discomfort where you understand that there are so many contradictions in our lives, you know, there is the ferocity of love and there is our ethical obligations and our kind of moral sense of who we are.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a beautiful question. For the first, I wrote this book over six years. I would say for the first half of those six years, it was the consciousness of the book leading me. It was the characters telling me what is truthful and what needs to happen. And that was a time of me narrating the book to myself. And when I knew what the story would be, then it changed and it became for me more about inviting the reader in how can I bring another person into this world, how can I encourage them to feel what I feel? And then I feel like I was leading the characters a little bit more.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will we live with ourselves when our love comes up against our moral selves to ask that question I had to push these characters into frightening, alarming situations where they help me think through that question and they help me stay with it?”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. That moment. Dadu, the grandfather, stole an orange from another child for his own grandchild, and but there was something in him which saw his own grandchild in that stranger's child too. Pleaded with him, I was responsible for that orange. I put it down for one minute. Please give it back to me. So he hasn't completely lost who he is. This is not coming from a place of being cold hearted, but coming back to your question of leading the characters here. I love thinking of fiction as a way to ask questions, and I want to ask questions with as much vigor and intricacy and complexity as possible. So in order to ask that question of”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was reading about climate change, I encountered a lot of declarations of hope. We must be hopeful, and the supposition was always that hope is pure and noble and unassailable. And I started thinking about, well, what happens if the manifestation of hope is vicious and is harmful? Think of these characters who are parents and guardians who are trying to protect their kids, and everything they do comes from a place of hope. But it is not a place of collective hope. It's a place of individual hope. Is that still a hope that we can be proud of? Is that still a hope that we will worship? I don't know, but the book for me.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's probably a little bit of both. It's probably a person who does want to help, has the resources to help, and is very aware of How it looks and how it makes her look, and how it sets her up to benefit in the future, to show loyalty to this city.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, he needed to have a child to get in. The feast was for children with their guardians. So he needed a child to gain access. Initially he thinks that he's going to kind of scoop her portion into a container for him for later, but he goes there and he sees her hunger, he sees that she needs help with cutting up pieces or peeling something and portioning something and he doesn't have the heart to take the food away from her. He helps her eat. And I wanted that to be a moment of such great contradiction too. Here's this person who is capable of doing. Really harmful things, but in the face of a child who is hungry and needs help with her food, he is unable to do anything but help.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot about class. I grew up in Kolkata, which is very stratified. I went to school and from the school bus I would see little kids who were not going to school, they were by the roadside washing dishes or sleeping at a bus stop. And I was aware of class very early, so in this book I really wanted to think about, well, in climate crisis, how are the different Class is going to respond to this. What are we going to do with different levels of resources? What is generosity going to look like? What is gratitude going to look like? When people have an opportunity to seize more How will they take that moment? I don't know that I have the answers, but you brought up the question and that's the question I had as well.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Live under systems which do not serve us. So if you think about the characters, how they go somewhere for help initially and they find that they are on their own. I wanted to think about both sides of that love and the moments in which you realize, oh, this system is not made for me.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was curious from you with the generational shift between Ma and Dadu, did you mean to have a commentary about modern society in the way we think about ourself and the collective, as you beautifully put it? Beautiful question. Yes, you know, I wanted the reader to be invited into this city and to see how it is not only a place of problems, but through the secondary characters there's a barber on the street, there's a rickshaw driver, there's a person playing the flute, there's a painter. Through all of these secondary characters, I wanted to show how vibrant this community is. This is a place of real networks and connections where people rely on each other, make claims on each other, depend on each other, and at the same time in modern society, we also”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I so Mega, I smiled every time Dad Dew showed up on my page. He really resonated with me in the sense that he seemed to expect the best of his neighbors in the community. And it really, really resonated with me because it reminded me of my own mother. My mom grew up not in Kolkata, but in Georgiana, Alabama in the 50s. And she talks a lot about how community was everything and how society was ordered in institutions of community churches and unions and the family. And nowadays, you know, we think about the self and the individual. We take selfies.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that question. Thank you. I think that the project of all fiction is to reveal something about human nature under pressure. And in this book, I wanted to focus on a moment at the edge where something is about to change you don't quite know in what direction that change will occur. That moment of enormous pressure on these characters is going to show us, I think, how we will operate when we are in situations of crisis, when we are in unstable times and unstable situations, who will we become? Are we our truest selves now in this moment of peace and comfort and abundance? Or is there a truer self hiding within us which will be revealed in a moment of scarcity and crisis?”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he has made a mistake which I will not get into, but he feels that being in the city alone is his chance to address that mistake to fix what he did.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to explore Reality of two kinds of guardians, one who has resources is pretty assured of safety to come, and one who is really struggling. So Bumba is a villager, he's a young man, he is struggling to find a foothold in the city, and he wants to protect his younger brother. He adores this little kid.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's such a beautiful question and a beautiful reading. Yes, I was interested in how there are no villains and there are no saints. You know, within each of us, there is the impulse to protect and love, and there is that capacity to To harm others if we need to for the people that we love, I think. That's one of the questions that I started out with is, would I do this? Would you do this? You know, where would your borders of your moral self be? And what would you do if you felt like your love was pushing you up against those borders?”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, she is too deep in the story that she has fabricated, that things are okay In that moment, which I won't give away, she decides that she has to continue doing that for him. That is the form in which she gives him love from so far away.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, who here in this room currently lives far away from home, from where you grew up Yes. Okay. So I think that you will understand that feeling when you live far away from your parents, that when you speak to them on the phone, you have to protect them. You cannot let them worry about you. That is your gift of love to them. I am okay. Everything is okay. And I wanted to talk about that kind of loving lie through Ma and her relationship with her husband. He's so far away he's in Michigan, she's in Colcata. There is nothing he can do but what she can do for him is she can protect him. Not convinced”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she knew that she was escaping to a place that was far away from her hometown, which she loved and adored and would miss, but it was also a city where she had been harassed as a girl, and she knew what it was like to be in the streets of that city as a girl. So there were injuries that she could finally escape from. And for Dadu, who The elderly man, who always paid more attention to the streetside jokes and conversations and the poetry and the laughter of the city, he felt that he would be diminished, there would be a version of himself, Which he would leave behind in his hometown. It would not go along with him. So there was immigration. There's pride in it, but there's also a wound. There's also a wound which never heals and the”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Raised in Kolkata as well, so it was really special Read the story and see it take place in that city. My dad came to the States to go to college as well, and my mom joined a few years later after they got married. For them, America was a land of opportunity, potential. What do you think America represented for Ma, Mishi, and Dadu? That's a great question, and I'm so happy that we are in the same room now. I think for the characters Ma Mishti and Dadu, America represented Certainly, a better future, a more secure future, but it had different textures for Ma, who's the mother and Dadu, who's the grandfather. The different texture was that for Ma, she was purely excited. She wanted that escape. She wanted that feeling of freedom and safety for her daughter.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I moved here at 19 to go to college. I received financial aid and I was very lucky it was a gift from Out of the Blue and it represented freedom to think for myself, the reason I started applying to schools in America from India was the schooling system that I was in felt very rigid to me. I was taught to learn with the aim of succeeding at exams and I knew that that's not the mode in which I wanted to do college and I wanted to come to this country To go to classes where I would be encouraged to form an opinion, to argue, to question what I read, and to think for myself.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think anybody can do it. You just look with attention and you think, well, what am I really seeing here and what are the connections that are forming for me in my mind? I love this because I feel like everybody here can be a fiction writer. If you're a reader, you can write. And if you look and you allow yourself to stay in that moment, even though it feels like an ordinary or banal moment, if you allow yourself to look for what is extraordinary and beautiful and worthwhile in it, you can see it too.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't find the words that are true. You start up here and you have to excavate the language until you get to the truest layer”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be okay with failing. This was new to me too, and Because riding is so often about having a vision for the story that you want to tell and you sit down to write it and you understand that you can't do it. It's difficult. You fail a lot and sitting with yourself.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, yes. Yes. Very much so. News stories that I read when I was in middle school showed up in my first book, things that I noticed when I'm out on a walk. You know, if you think about your own neighborhood, if you think about the doors and houses and people and gardens that you pass by, and you think about, well, how would I put this in words? Where's the language for this? And the other thing that happens when you think of yourself as a writer is you understand that you have to”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I knew when So writing is not just about writing, right? It's about living in a mode of inquiry. It's about living with attention.”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot about how one of the things that fiction can do is help us approach the truth of another person in their fullness, right? So even when we see a photo of somebody who is flattened in a moment of crisis, who is reduced to their crisis, fiction can restore who they are. Fiction can give them back, their jokes, their humor, their love, their irritations, the things that annoy them, everything that makes them who they are. I think that is a beautiful task that fiction can take on”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started from the complete opposite place of thinking about how my family bonds with food. We love cooking, we love eating, and think about the emotional charge of having a meal with people you love, that connective tissue. It's so elemental. And when I was thinking about climate change, I thought about, well, what happens when in that kind of crisis our familiar foods go away? What if you sit down to dinner and instead of the food that nourishes you, that you love, it's insect protein and algae, how is that going to change how you feel about that togetherness with the people that you treasure?”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am completely fascinated by the conflict between the What is good for us and our loved ones, our family? And what is good for the collective, our neighbors, our society? And I think that the world that we live in, the systems and networks of power that we live in, the Force us to look at that gap because what is good for me is not necessarily good for my neighbor. How do we live when we understand that our love, our hope can have a manifestation which is vicious and fierce for somebody else?”
2025-10-14 · The Oprah Podcast · Megha Majumdar: "A Guardian and a Thief" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT