The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of Behind the Beautiful Forever's,

the National Book Award-winning Chronicle of Life in a Mumbai slum by Catherine Boone.

I'm Dan Coase, editor of the Slate Book Review, and I'm here in Slate's DC Recording Studio with Hannah Rosen, Slate's double X editor. Hi. Hi, Dan. And up in New Haven, we're joined by Slate Senior Editor Emily Bazelon. Hi, Emily. Hi, Dan. Hi, Hannah. Hi. So we'll be discussing the fates of the many characters and behind the Beautiful Forever's in some detail.

And a few of those fates are happy ones.

So if spoilers matter to you, you might want to listen to us after you read the book, which I certainly recommend you do.

In Behind the Beautiful Forever's through four years of reporting in Anawadi, a slum on the edge of Mumbai's airport.

Catherine Boo tells the stories of about a dozen residents of the undercity.

Garbage pickers, fixers, mothers, children.

All of them are striving to better themselves, even as the unbelievable pressures of their lives

and the rampant corruption of the new India make that

basically an impossible task.

And so I think maybe the first question I'd want to ask both of you about this book,

which is extremely well reported and extremely well written and really super depressing, is

it too depressing?

Is this book like too much to take?

You know, I think of great narrative

nonfiction as having some kind of drama or tension to it. But for me, one of the interesting

things about this book was it was almost completely drained of tension because it was clear

from almost the beginning that there was potentially no way out for any of these.

I did not experience the book like that at all. I think one of the beauties of the way that Kate writes, I'm sorry, I call her Kate, she and I used to work together at the Washington Post, and so we were friends. So there, that's out there. One of the beauties of the way Kate writes is that she lets you forget for long periods of time because we're often thinking of us and them, right?

You certainly think of slum dwellers as very different from you and, you know, largely invisible.

...