![]() But what happened was that I went through unbelievable amounts of pain for about half a year, if not more, and I saw maybe 20 different doctors, including urologists, of course, but hypnotists as well and psychiatrists and plastic surgeons. It hurt to urinate for years, and quite a bit later last year in the middle of the pandemic, toward August/September, without getting too graphic about it, the surgery's mistakes reasserted themselves and I ended up having a second surgery in which a nerve in that very sensitive region was cut. The surgery was botched from the beginning. On how the pain he suffered as the result of a botched circumcision he had at age 7 affected the tone of his novel And I think it's a kind of new kind of novel for people who don't live in communities that are predominantly native born, white American. So six out of eight characters were not born in the United States, and I think that kind of mirrors the life that I live in. And I would say at least way more than half of my friends are also of immigrant backgrounds, roughly the same kind of people that populate this book - Korean Americans, Gujarati Americans, other folks from the subcontinent. My mentor, the Korean American writer Chang-Rae Lee, was born in Seoul. This is a very much "write what you know" scenario. On why many of the book's characters are immigrants I think we were trying to shield ourselves from the pandemic, but we were also trying to discover who we were, both as individuals and as groups. I see this and hear about this all the time. I know so many people who have changed careers, who have changed their conception of themselves and sometimes their conception of themselves in relation to their friends. I think that this pandemic has made people reconsider their lives. "It's when I close my eyes and think of something that's beautiful and safe." "For me, upstate and small upstate cabins are a kind of holy grail," Shteyngart says. Occasionally his family would leave the city to visit a bungalow community of other Russian immigrants upstate, and he'd feel at home. Growing up as the child of Soviet immigrants in Queens, N.Y., he struggled to learn the language and was bullied relentlessly. New York's Hudson Valley holds a particular significance to Shteyngart. The novel mirrors Shteyngart's own pandemic experience, in which he hunkered down in upstate New York with his wife, his child and two close friends. "I wanted to write a book about friendship." "This was sort of my pandemic project," Shteyngart says. ![]() Our Country Friends is about eight friends riding out the COVID pandemic in the country home of a Russian-born American writer. Some people got into baking bread during the pandemic. ![]() Gary Shteyngart's previous books include Super Sad True Love Story, Little Failure and Lake Success.
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