Pushkin.

What do poll dancing, AI Chappots and diet culture all have in common.

These subjects have a home on Embodied, the award-winning podcast I host from North Carolina

Public Radio W-U-N-C.

My name is Anita Rao, and you can consider me your personal guide to taking on the taboo.

Join me to explore important questions about our bodies and our society, where nothing is off limits.

So go ahead, listen to Embodied every Friday wherever you get your podcasts. This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco, so

Welcome to the show. Today on this holiday weekend I wanted to revisit a talk from earlier this year with author Jumpo Lahiri. She won the Pulitzer

Prize for Fiction back in 1999 for her short story collection interpreter of Maladies. It was a stunning debut from Lahiri, then age

32 that led to several more books, some of which you've probably read. The namesake, on a custom earth, the lowland, but on the heels of this

international success, Lahiri decided to leave America for Rome in 2011. There she started to learn Italian, immersing herself in the language,

finding refuge in this foreign city. After years of rigorous study, Lohiri published her first novel in Italian in 2018.

The book, titled Whereabouts, has now been translated into English and is available wherever you do your reading.

Told through a series of vignettes, it follows a woman in transit, moving about a city,

sometimes in solitude, sometimes with friends, lovers, in turn we move with her, step by step.

Around her house, museums, stores, bars, toggling back and forth between the past and present.

After a year of lockdown, there's something at once therapeutic and devastating in reading

this book.

You feel less alone with the narrator even while Lahiri creates this meditation

on loneliness. Clearly this piece was born out of this move to Europe that I mentioned, but to understand the power of the book and

Lahiri's work, you have to understand where she comes from.

Lahiri was born in London to Bengali parents.

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