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

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4.6 • 924 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	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen wherever you get your podcast.
0:37.7	From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the NERNAT book club, which is just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by. Somehow, it is both already August and only
0:45.9	eight months into the year 2020. But either way, our pick this month is called members only.
0:52.8	At its core, it's about Raj, who's a middle-aged Indian
0:55.8	American man and he's trying to get through life without making anyone too mad, but also
1:00.8	really tired of living that way. It takes place over the course of one extremely stressful week
1:07.4	in which Raj makes a very public and very embarrassing blunder. At the end of this
1:13.3	month, we're going to have a super spoilery panel discussion all about members only. But today,
1:17.9	we are going to have a spoiler-free chat with the author, Samir Pandya. He's with us now. Samir,
1:23.9	hi. Hey, Greta. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing okay. Yeah,
1:29.3	suddenly August has arrived. Isn't that just like the weirdest thing? Yeah. I mean, it's weird,
1:35.7	particularly when time has become so strange and then suddenly it just pops up. Yeah. So here we are.
1:43.7	Okay, so I don't want to give too much of the storyline
1:46.5	away because this is a very plotty book and I love that about it. But I think it's fair to say
1:52.7	that in the opening pages of this story, we meet Raj, who's a member at a tennis club. And he's
1:59.2	been chosen to be on a committee to help choose new members of
2:02.6	this club, which he's taking really seriously as an opportunity, especially to help bring some
	...

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