Book Club: Let’s Talk ‘Members Only’ With Author Sameer Pandya

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4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’re all human, but who has the right to make mistakes? That’s a question at the heart of Members Only, the debut novel from author Sameer Pandya. In it, Raj Bhatt's life falls apart after he makes a racist remark to an African-American couple at a posh tennis club.

In this Nerdette Book Club author interview, host Greta Johnsen talks with Pandya about the weaponization of the term “cancel culture,” why a tennis club serves as the setting for a story about Indian-American identity and who gets to recover from their mistakes.

Listen to this spoiler-free conversation with Pandya and then join us later this month for a panel discussion on Members Only.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This fall, W bez invites you to our upcoming live events.
0:05.0	Join us in person for smart discussions, heartfelt storytelling, and more.
0:09.0	Check out the full calendar now at W be easy.org
0:12.6	slash events.
0:13.6	From W be easy Chicago I'm Greta Johnson and this is the
0:20.1	Nernet Book Club which is just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by.
0:26.1	Somehow it is both already August and only eight months into the year 2020. But either way our pick this month is called
0:35.8	members only. At its core it's about Raj who's a middle-aged Indian American man and he's
0:41.5	trying to get through life without making anyone too mad but also really
0:46.0	tired of living that way. It takes place over the course of one extremely stressful week in which
0:52.4	Raj makes a very public and very embarrassing
0:56.4	blonder.
0:57.4	At the end of this month we're going to have a super spoilery panel discussion all
1:00.9	about members only, but today we are going to have a spoiler
1:03.9	free chat with the author Samir Pandya he's with us now Samir.
1:08.3	Hi, hey Greta how are you I'm good how are you. Yeah, suddenly August has arrived and isn't that just like the
1:16.8	weirdest thing? Yeah, I mean it's weird is particularly when time has become so
1:22.4	strange and then suddenly it just pops up.
1:25.8	Yeah, so here we are.
1:27.4	Okay, so I don't want to give too much of the storyline away because this is a very plotty book and I love that
1:34.8	about it but I think it's fair to say that in the opening pages of this story we
1:39.9	meet Raj who's a member at a tennis club and he's been chosen to be on a committee to
	...

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