Portrait: Saraid de Silva, by Anna Rankin

The floor in the entrance hallway of Saraid de Silva’s city apartment in Auckland is lined with heels and boots of varying style and heel height that stand as careful ornaments like tended orchids on the boxes in which they came. Set against the wall in fastidious arrangement are sturdy combat boots with thick rubber soles, heeled slides Prada-brown, black leather knee high boots conscientiously stuffed with paper to maintain their sculpted calves. An enormous bicycle dangling from the ceiling invokes a provisional sculpture with the various straps and ropes required to secure the instrument above the front door, which immediately greets an approaching visitor and which demands one duck in order to enter.  
Inside, de Silva is feverish: boiling spaghetti on the stove, in correspondence on her phone in advance of an appointment following ours, throwing items into a pot; a negroni procured with a bartender’s confidence, sizeable mounds of pale parmesan filed onto her dinner. I am seated across from de Silva at the white kitchen island in her white kitchen facing wide panes of windows ceiling to floor that fill almost an entire wall. The bitter winter night presses against the glass; she’s saving, she says, for blinds. 
The author of the decidedly acclaimed novel, Amma, published in May and on the Nielsen BookScan bestseller list ever since, de Silva is something of a doyenne in Tāmaki Makaurau’s literary scene and indeed seems characteristic of the city’s particular currency within that kingdom; glamorous, droll, sharp, multifarious, connected, candid, magnanimous but judicious, if a foe then one feared; categorical attributes found in memorable writers of Auckland that differ from the city south more certain of its literary culture and the writers it produces.
The particulars of a city, it might be said, constitute the writer. Amma, with its woven tale of three women, recalls Robert Altman’s 1977 film entitled as such, which came to him in a dream, in its triad of women transmitting and transferring their fears, losses, repressions, desires; its releases and its traps; revulsions, shame and secrets into a shared psyche that reveals and conceals, layers and peels across generations, forming an indistinct frieze composed of fragments that form a whole, though wholly staccato. Altman is thought to have been influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, wherethe identities of dual women fuse in an archetypal model of doubling; where the unspeakable emerges in its antagonistic twin and where, Marc Gervais in his study of Bergman’s films, observes, there is the “fusion of two personalities into one; the different sides of the same personality momentarily merging”. It’s well cited in the literature and indeed expressed throughout literature that the subjectivity of women relates to the multiple, the fragment, the contradictory, where the masculine invokes the whole, the resolute assertion of a unified self; though these are perhaps obsolete binarisms bound to modernism and its subsequent rejection; such categories have disintegrated though it’s a perhaps enduring contention that, as critic Audrey Wollen famously claimed in her wry 2016 artwork posted on Instagram, rearranging Simone Weil’s writing of the self in quippy internet locution, girls own the void.
It is no surprise that Amma summons cinema; de Silva has a background in theatre and playwriting and works a day job as a television writer. Amma conjures the quick cuts of filmmaking; the book is composed of brief chapters descriptive in their studies of character and setting; a scene dissolves into another, across another time and geography. The writing is imagistic, evocative and meticulous, the dialogue assured. It’s also a novel that reflects aspects of de Silva’s life. Born in Hamilton where she lived until she was 10, de Silva was raised by her mother and grandmother, and in Catholic schooling, after her parents divorced. Her mother was a busy lawyer supporting her own mother and daughter; she was made partner in a family law firm before transitioning into environmental law. It was de Silva’s gran, or Amma, who primarily cared for de Silva during those years. The pair had 10 years knitted together, she says. 
Her gran was born in Singapore, moving to Sri Lanka when she married a psychiatrist who together moved to the small settlement of Waikouaiti in East Otago. The landing shock must have been bewildering. With a changing mental health system in favour of community organisations and deinstitutionalisation, the demand for skilled psychiatrists and psychologists in Aotearoa the 1960s and 70s led to the migration of her grandparents who joined a wave of Sri Lankans and Indians in the field; a fact she discovered through watching a series by Madeleine Sami which discussed migration patterns of South Asians in Aotearoa. Her grandfather died before she was born; her gran didn’t speak of it; her mother, who lost her father at 19, began talking about him as de Silva grew up. It was too sad, she says.
Her own father had been a teacher; she’s unsure what he does now and isn’t certain where he lives; they no longer speak. She moved from Hamilton to Glenfield on Auckland’s North Shore with mother and her new partner; again she uprooted to live with her father and stepmother in Tauranga until she was 14; again, she moved, this time to Christchurch, with them, until the pair left for the United Arab Emirates and de Silva boarded with a family until she could finish high school in Christchurch. Who organised all this, I wonder. “Kinda my dad, kinda me,” she shrugs. She concedes it was hard, she doesn’t stay with the subject long.
The first home in which she boarded was difficult: “the mother didn’t really want me there”, the next place worked out. The disruption, the pressure to perform, the precarity that comes with living in a borrowed family seems curiously untroubling for de Silva. It was, she says, easier than living at home. Twirling strands of spaghetti around her fork she asks again, and with concern, whether I might like to eat something, which I decline. “Culturally,” she laughs, “this is a big challenge for me.” My own mother advised me never to show up anywhere empty handed, eagerly shoving hand cut flowers, cupboard goods or items of her own into my hands as I walked out the door, which draws a smile from de Silva who responds that in her family it’s implied, but never outwardly stated.
At high school she read John Pilger essays; she thought she might like to be a war correspondent: “It’s always pitched as being kind of glamorous and sexy, but it isn’t—it’s horrible. And living out of a bag? Kind of my worst nightmare, to be honest.” At 33, de Silva owns her own home. 
From Pilger to drama school; de Silva completed a year of English Literature and Law at Te Herenga Waka University of Wellington at the behest of her mother and against her own desires; switching, instead, to acting at Unitec in Auckland. Didion drew a relationship between the dual urges of writing and acting, arguing that the two were Janus-faced; she herself wrote stories from the time she was a little girl, she writes, “but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realise then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.”
De Silva doesn’t miss acting at all though she devoted some years to pursuing it during her studies in theatre and work as an actor. While studying, she began playwriting with a friend and fellow actor; their plays combined fiction and autobiography. A favourite play is The Nina Variations, playwright Steven Dietz’s tribute to Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which the two lovers repeat in 43 variations the play’s final scene. De Silva studied playwriting under the tutelage of renowned dramatist Gary Henderson, under whom I too spent half a semester in my 20s in the guise of writing for the screen though we read only plays, to which de Silva laughs, reaching for a beer, “Gary’s cool, he’s a g. Maybe the first person I wrote something creative for….It’s so funny when I’m relaying my life—I have this tendency to make it sound intentional and it was just so not intentional. I wrote plays because I didn’t get enough work as an actor and that seemed like a way to be in the scene.”
De Silva had eight odd years of steady advertorial work as an actor coupled with regular voiceover work; her voice is raspy and strong; advertising was once lucrative with its large sums but has dwindled over the years; auditions petered out, she turned to writing; penning articles, short interviews. She went abroad and picks her way through her words when describing wanting to leave the country for quite literally anyplace else. She adjusts herself, cocks her head. “Things you’re impressed by at 22 are,” suppressing an arch smile, “numerous.” At that age, she had a vastly older boyfriend, “it was neither here nor there, it was what it was”. He put her onto Martin Amis. “He wasn’t a bad person—he read books.” Toward my incredulity at this low bar de Silva laughs and lowers her brow: “Have you met men? Straight men? Straight men don’t read fiction. I’d never met a man who read fiction.”
She returned to Aotearoa, left again, worked as an au pair in Germany, auditioned for the eminently competitive National Youth Theatre of Great Britain into which she was accepted but it was prohibitively expensive, and, astonishingly, unpaid, with the cohort living in London and acceptance into the programme being the sole way to audition for the company’s plays. The class imbalance in the arts remains a subject of serious concern; a 2022 article in the Guardian published research that found the proportion of working-class actors, writers and musicians in the UK had halved since the 1970s. De Silva could have applied for a working visa and worked part time were it not for the fact that a role in a play equalled full time rehearsals. “It’s only rich people who act in the UK,” she says. “The National Youth Theatre is a real path for actors, but you have to be able to afford to live in London without a job.” Living with her mother at no cost was a principal determinant as to how de Silva would, in the years to come, write her best-selling novel.
De Silva makes the acclaimed RNZ podcast series Conversations with My Immigrant Parents, now in its third series following its inception in 2019; she co-hosts with Julie Zhu, and the pair cut across the country interviewing immigrant whānau who speak plainly of their lives on this curious island. She’s written articles, very good ones, for Ensemble and elsewhere; she can write unerringly across registers and is slightly vexed by the categorisation of a project like the podcast as “human interest stories” rather than work that, as with all journalism, requires research, craft, technique and time.
She completed a Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland under Paula Morris; she loved the deadlines, the pressure, the knowledge she had just a year to produce something of worth. It was challenging living with her mother while studying and working part-time on the podcast; both mother and daughter agreed to never repeat the experiment. She found her classmates on the programme largely difficult: “They were older, more secure, mostly white. The cohort is important, but less so than the work you put in.”
In 2019, a year prior to studying, de Silva lost her gran. 2020 with its acute and permeating grief and horror and tragedy around the globe surely compressed her single loss amid an overwhelming scale of sorrow. Grieving the loss of one uniquely significant life tends to sharpen the relief of the losses experienced by strangers. It can be unsettling to relate to those who are not acquainted with death; to have no frame of reference relative to loss. Amma was the only thing she could write, she says. “I was so grief stricken and messed up by losing her.” She wrote the book across 2020 into 2021. “I just wanted to dream her. I was haunted by this idea that I’d never know her. And if so, that I wouldn’t know myself, because it was just me and her for so long and we just had each other, and I could never access that again.”
Part two of Anna Rankin’s epic profile of novelist Saraid de Silva, author of the year’s most admired novel, Amma (Moa Books, $37.99), continues in ReadingRoom tomorrow. The novel is available in bookstores nationwide and through Bookhub, the fast and easy way to buy NZ books. From a rave review by Betty Davis: “I met Saraid de Silva at a Palestine rally in Auckland over the summer. She told me there would be a Wellington launch for her new book, Amma. I attended it on a Wednesday, bought the book, read it by Saturday and gave it to my visiting sister to take back with her to Auckland on Sunday. She read it at the gate, read it with her breakfast, read it with her dinner and finished it a few days later, sending me crying emoji faces and ‘this book’. Soon after she bought it for her friend’s birthday.”
Saraid de Silva is appearing at WORD Christchurch Festival in late August.