'Your Driver is Waiting' takes a modern spin on 'Taxi Driver'

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Who would Travis Bickle– the protagonist of the 1976 film Taxi Driver – be today? That question sparked the new novel by Priya Guns, Your Driver Is Waiting. It follows Damani, a queer Tamil ride-share driver who is struggling to pay her bills while people on the street around her protest for cause after cause that she can't seem to keep track of. Then she meets Jolene, who is the epitome of the privilege Damani does not have. As Guns tells NPR's Scott Simon, it's a relationship that forces her protagonist to reckon with her own preconceptions of wealth and whiteness.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Kia Miyaka-Nates, and this is NPR's Book of the Day.
0:07.9	The L.A. Times called today's book, Travis Bickle meets Tony Morrison.
0:12.7	An unlikely pairing, the fictional lead character of the 1970s film Taxi Driver and an award-winning novelists don't seem like they belong in the same
0:22.7	conversation, let alone sentence, but somehow author Priya Guns makes it work. Her book,
0:29.6	Your Driver's Waiting, is told from the perspective of an exhausted, overworked, queer Tamil
0:35.7	rideshare driver navigating survival, her crumbling home life, maybe even love.
0:41.4	Here's Guns with NPR Scott Simon. She talks about writing books for short attention spans
0:46.4	and also why we should try to make social change entertaining. In the U.S., national security news can
0:53.7	feel far away from daily life. Distant wars,
0:56.9	murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR
1:02.7	reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events
1:07.8	matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or
1:12.4	wherever you get your podcasts. Check your phone. Your driver is two minutes away. Ah, wait. Priya Guns
1:22.3	novel. Your driver is waiting. Tells the story of a driver named Domie. Who is Tamil, queer, straining to make
1:29.4	ends meet, driving for a living, but she hopes not a life in an unnamed North American city that
1:36.2	roils with protests, squash dreams, and part-time gigs. And then Dominie runs into someone special
1:43.0	who upends her life, not in a good way.
1:47.0	Priya Guns joins us now from Amman, Jordan.
1:49.3	Thank you so much for being with us.
1:51.2	Thank you for having me.
1:52.4	Your voice is super buttery.
1:53.8	I feel like I need to up my sultry right now.
	...

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