I apologized to best-selling author Thrity Umrigar before I asked her. “I am sorry if this question is trite,” I said, “but why do you write?”

She answered quickly and easily: “Because I feel sick if I don’t.”

Umrigar was at Book Passage in Corte Madera to discuss her new novel, If Today Be Sweet. The novel’s main character is Tehmina Sethna, a recently widowed women from India who has gone to Ohio to visit her son and his family. The novel takes place between mid-December and New Years Eve, and during this time Tehmina is confronted with a decision – whether to stay in Ohio and live with her son permanently, or return to India.

Umrigar herself grew up in India. When she was twenty-one, she decided to immigrate to the United States and go to Ohio State University to get a degree in journalism. She worked as a journalist for many years. Currently, she is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve in Ohio.

Umrigar told the audience that she wrote If Today Be Sweet to express her “accumulated feelings, thoughts, and opinions about the U.S.” She was especially interested in exploring, in a light-hearted tone, America’s culture of celebrity.

Her new novel also explores immigration. Umrigar said that she has been listening to the debate on immigration with increasing dismay. Immigration is viewed, she argued, as simply a problem to be solved. She created her main character, Tehmina Sethna, to humanize the issue. Umrigar hopes that her readers, seeing the world through Tehmina’s eyes, will come to feel the “enormity of the decision” to leave one’s homeland and immigrate to a new country. The novel is intended to show that immigrants make terribly difficult choices.

Umrigar told the audience that she is already thinking about her next novel. In it, she plans to tell the story of an American couple that moves to India, trying to recover from the death of their seven-year-old son. The heart of the novel will be how the couple deals with this horrible event.

Surprisingly, Umrigar seemed to already know what the completed novel would contain. Some writers construct their novels chapter by chapter, writing without a firm idea of how their novel will look when finished. After telling the audience about her next (possible) book, Umrigar revealed that she does not write that way. She explained that, before she begins to actually write a novel, or even just a chapter, she has already thought it through. For her, writing a novel without having a good idea of the finished product would be like constructing “a seventeen-story building without knowing the shape of it.”