For Sarah Thankam Mathews, organizing is about people and potential

The “All This Could Be Different” author chatted with us about embarrassed millionaires, mutual aid and Milwaukee.

I’m a couple of years older than Sneha, the protagonist of “All This Could Be Different,” but her predicament resonated with me right away: graduating college in the middle of the Great Recession, seeing my classmates’ job offers disappear overnight and being grateful for whatever job I could get — no matter how toxic the work environment was.

And that formative experience created a generational divide on job loyalty. My parents’ generation has the idea that you could work at a company for 30 years, then they would take care of you when you retire. That’s all but a myth to the millennials I know, who were disillusioned with their jobs from the start. 

Author Sarah Thankam Mathews told me she set out to create a “group portrait” of this generational cohort, starting with Sneha and widening out over the course of her debut novel. The way her characters, their experiences and personal beliefs all interact changed the way I thought about my own career and the economic forces that shape it.

“I wanted politics in my novel to show up at the level of dialogue, show up at the level of conflict. No one person has all the answers,” Mathews told me. “And these young people form each other, they learn how to think through thinking together.”

I called up Mathews to talk about her characters’ journey, her own mutual aid work and why she set her National Book Award finalist in Milwaukee. Here are edited excerpts of that conversation.

“This Is Uncomfortable”: One thing that really stuck out to me, especially as a “This Is Uncomfortable” producer, was just how poorly equipped Sneha was to have these awkward money conversations with her friends. Her exploitative job stops paying her on time, but she hides her looming poverty until it’s gone so far, and finally her friend Tig figures it out anyway. It’s so hard to talk about money with friends because it is this taboo, you know? 

Sarah Thankam Mathews: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to make very clear throughout the novel that the first way that we interact with money, almost all of us, is emotion. And I think that you see that from the beginning. Sneha, fresh out of college, gets to tell herself a certain story about herself. You get to see her talk about martini lunches and taking women out on dates and getting to feel the joys of being generous because she’s feeling kind of flush, and feeling like she was one of the spared ones in this difficult new economy and difficult new country for her. And then you see her start to grapple with the fact that this might be less and less the case, you know, even for one of the lucky ones. 

And this is just a fact of the American economy, how it works. People are not situated to take on the punches that life throws at any of us at any time. And so when you see those punches start to come for Sneha, you see the ways in which she deals with that emotionally, and a huge part of the emotion for her is shame. The shame leads to silence, it leads to secrecy. She doesn’t tell her friends what’s going on, she doesn’t tell her family what’s going on. She just keeps denying it and also trying to tough it out until, you know, she ends up at the food pantry.

Many people have talked to me about not having seen that in contemporary fiction — a scene of a certain kind of character at the food pantry at the church, trying to get food, get groceries, so as to not go hungry. And I was interested in sort of starting from this beginning of like, oh, she’s flush, she’s doing well. And getting to a point to be like, oh, actually this can happen to her, it can happen to any of us. So what do we do? 

TIU: That was a really powerful scene to me because it was one where her mask came off finally, and she’s confronted with the reality of her financial situation. Also, she’s met with such dignity and compassion by the people who work there, but she still feels that shame as she rushes away. 

Mathews: Totally, and you see the way in which she does not want to affiliate herself with anyone else. You know, the food pantry — she’s kind of bemused by everything. She’s noticing the fluorescent lights, she’s noticing different kinds of people. She’s shocked that a teacher at a public school is there and seeming kind of chipper about it. I think it’s a Steinbeck quote, about how most Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. I think this is true of this main character, in ways that she’s not even aware of. She looks around, and at some quiet level, even though she’s being treated well, she thinks, “I am not of you. I am not meant to be here.” And that’s how many other people in the room also feel. 

TIU: It’s interesting that Sneha, as an immigrant, is newer to America but she has totally drunk the Kool-Aid on that American myth: the individualism, bootstraps and moral shame of asking for help.  

Mathews: Yeah, absolutely. And there are different kinds of cross-cultural formations here. I think that if you’re an immigrant from South Asia, as Sneha is, there’s a lot of emphasis on a certain degree of like what I’ll call avoidance of losing face, you know. This idea that the people you can go to with your money problems, it’s your kin, it’s your family, it’s your blood. But other people should not know. And it’s complicated for Sneha, who I think in some ways is the product of both cultural forces, like both the American bootstrapping independence, “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” narrative, but also, I think, the secrecy and propriety and keeping up appearances and pride that she just picked up by osmosis in the context that she grew up in.

TIU: Yeah, she really has a foot in two worlds, particularly financially, because she is trying to scrape by herself while also sending money home when possible.

I wanted to also ask you about your community organizing work with Bed-Stuy Strong, the mutual aid group you started in Brooklyn [New York] during the early days of the pandemic. That was actually one of the first times I’d ever heard about mutual aid, and it was just so impressive how quickly you got that up and running and the impact that I saw it having in our communities. Knowing that background of yours, I couldn’t help but connect it to the themes of communal living and the mutual support expressed in this book.  

Mathews: I look back at it as something that felt like the most moving and important thing that I got to be a part of maybe in my life. … I got to see people acting together, trying to do something new and trying to create new systems, new structures, for a real community need. We ended up supporting 20,000 people and raised and truly redistributed like $1.3 million in grassroots donations.

And “mutual aid,” ultimately, you know, it’s a political term, but I think the simplest and truest definition is the idea that our community’s help can meet our community’s needs, in a sort of join-hands person-to-person way. And in doing that, it creates space for us all to question why those needs exist in the first place. Why, in the richest city in the richest country in the world, are so many people homeless? Are people who are living in my neighborhood calling me and crying and saying, like, “My three kids have not eaten”?

So I think that that was transformative for me. All around me in my life in 2020, there were all these examples of — alongside horrible news events and headlines — all these examples of muscular, robust goodness and solidarity all around us. And that is present within the novel. You see these young people saying, “Well, all of us are being affected by rents that we’re struggling with, landlords that we’re struggling with. Is there something we can do about this?” And over time, right, because they’re also busy with other things like going on dates and going to their jobs.

TIU: Sneha’s friends aspire to create a more communal way of living, and by the end of the book, they’ve kinda succeeded! But I appreciated that it is messy, and it’s people trying their best, but, you know, it’s not perfect, right? It felt very realistic. We don’t suddenly arrive at a utopia. Rather, it’s a continual process, and they keep on putting in the work for themselves and for each other. 

Mathews: It really felt very important to me to convey that these young people’s radical dreaming, if it was actually executed, that would be difficult and flawed and complicated, because, let’s be honest, people are difficult and flawed and complicated. And this becomes all the more true when you’re trying to form coalitions or work with people across the lines of class, race and gender. But ultimately, when we think about the loneliness and the alienation that marks the lives of so many people — you know, we see this in headlines all the time, the ways in which Americans are lonely, are struggling, have less investment in friendship, are less partnered, belong to fewer organizations — I think all of us get to ask ourselves, do we want to have the problems of loneliness and atomization, or do we want to have the problems of community? Because community certainly has its problems. Other people are difficult, sometimes maddening. To be in community means to at least some of the time be in conflict. And still, I think that it’s what many of us need and want and crave. 

TIU: Absolutely. I came across another interview you did, where you said: “Something that unites my art-making and my organizing is this view of each person as a wounded but glorious site of possibility.” And I loved that. It really fits both spheres of your work. 

Mathews: Absolutely. You know, I think that people have this idea that organizing means calling people up or going from door to door and saying, “Hey hey hey! This issue matters! Sign my petition, this issue matters!” And in a lot of ways, I think of my art-making and my organizing as like living in these really separate boxes. And to me, being a writer is the center of the thing for me. If people ask me what I do, I say, I’m a writer and I organize sometimes. Not everything I write is like, quote-unquote “political” at every single moment. But I do think that one of the things that unites these two frames, or ways of being in the world, is exactly what you said. It’s saying to people, you matter. Actually you have value and are vast and complicated and worth paying so many different kinds of attention to. I think that’s what connects the fiction and any organizing work I’ve ever done. 

TIU: One thing that really stuck out about the book is how rooted it is in the Midwest, which feels unusual in a lot of contemporary literature. There’s this beautiful speech from one character, Tig, where they say, “Don’t you dare forget this place. … Don’t you ever, ever, ever become one of those people nose in the air, calling all this flyover country. Thinking we’re just about beer and cheese and serial killers and corn. Things happen here. Happened here. … Milwaukee, baby. We have real history. Remember us right.” Why did you choose to set the book in Milwaukee? 

Mathews: I lived in Milwaukee for a year, and it’s fascinating to me because of its history, something that the book alludes to periodically. It’s a history where a bunch of immigrants, primarily from Germany and Eastern Europe, showed up and brought their writing, brought their thinking, brought their own organizing, and created a socialist government over 40 years. And I think that’s a history that not that many people know about — that this was a major American city run by socialists. 

And what those socialists did was tremendous. They did not focus and live in the theory. They were interested in the application, they were interested in sewers and good housing for workers, and newspapers and parks and things that made people’s lives better. I think that is a realm of politics that I’m interested in, all of us paying a little bit more attention to and trying to embody what it means to live in application. Be united, not necessarily in our ideology, in our beliefs, but united in our practices, of bringing a more livable world that we all have to exist in, to us, for all of us.

---

What’s next for the Uncomfortable Book Club!

Our next selection is “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.” In three weeks, Reema Khrais will talk with author Hanif Abdurraqib about his nuanced relationship with money and success, his philosophies around giving and what it means to be in community. When our new season starts next month, this newsletter will start hitting your inbox weekly with each new episode. Our book club isn’t going away, though! We’ll be running new author interviews on the last Friday of each month, with plenty of heads up about our picks. If you want to suggest a title, just drop us a line.

The Comfort Zone

What our team is into this week

• You can find more of Mathews’ writing over at her Substack, “thot pudding.”
• She’s also featured in two of our favorite columns: Dear Prudence and Grub Street Diet.
• Incredible photos in this piece about WNBA tunnel looks.
• Shoutout to Ellie the Elephant btw, Zoë’s new favorite icon.
• Shoutout also to anyone who ever returned a lost wallet.
• Cool zine about community college.
• The new “Embedded” season, about sex-testing at the Olympics, is fantastic.
• From The Times of London: “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children).”
• There’s a ton of money to be made in easing men’s fears of balding, erectile dysfunction and talking about either of them with a doctor.
• Related: You’re gonna start seeing a lot of ads for knockoff Ozempic, so read up.  
• Gillian Jacobs did another “99% Invisible” about the L.A. River.
• Song of the week: How about a cut from Milwaukee’s own the Promise Ring?