In this week’s episode of the Missouri Review’s Soundbooth Podcast, we talk to Joanna Luloff about her new book, writing process, and career. Luloff, 2006 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prizewinner for “Let Them Ask,” is also the author of The Beach at Galle Road: Stories from Sri Lanka (Algonquin, 2012) and Remind Me Again What Happened (Algonquin, 2018). Luloff talked with TMR intern Skyler Rossi about audience, the process of submitting and the unconventional way she was notified about being published in TMR. You can listen to the interview here. 

“In an interview, the fiction writer Mavis Gallant once described waking from an anesthetic after surgery, so groggy she knew only two things: that she was a writer and that she was from Quebec. This anecdote returned to me while reading Joanna Luloff’s sly, slow burn of a novel, Remind Me Again What Happened, in which Claire, a globetrotting journalist in her thirties, contracts a virus that wipes out wide swaths of her memory. Who are we to ourselves, and what remains of a self, without our memories?” Read the full review here.

“Reporting a story in India, Claire is bitten by a mosquito and winds up with encephalitis.  Her husband, Charlie, and best friend, Rachel, take her home to Vermont where Claire tries to cope not only with physical problems but also with fragmented memory loss….” Read the full review here.

“Luloff has an uncanny ability to alternate point of view and give her readers just enough information with each chapter to keep them on their toes, wanting to know the story behind these puzzle pieces of memories gifted throughout each chapter. Her use of photos scattered throughout the novel gives the book a nonfiction element that pulls on the story’s theme of truth: What is it? How does memory inform it? How does point of view bend the truth? Ultimately, the novel hooks readers from the start. It’s a page-turner filled with depth, secrecy, and thrill that’ll have you questioning your own concept of truth and reality.” Read the full review here.

“At its center, my novel is an investigation of memory, its ties to identity, sense of home and belonging, and the fragmentation and fractures that come when we lose it. When Claire suffers memory loss, she, her husband Charlie, and best friend Rachel, become detectives of their own past. Rachel hunts down all of Claire’s favorite foods to help trigger her lost history, believing that sensory memories might help rebuild Claire’s ties to the past. I imagine that a lot of this detective work also centers around music. The two friends spend a lot of time digging through storage boxes, one or two of which must hold CDs from their graduate school days as well as the albums Claire might have saved from her parents’ collections and her high school and college years. Here is a list of songs I imagine playing in the background in the homes of my characters—from childhood through graduate school and, eventually, in Charlie’s home after Claire returns from the hospital.” Read about and listen to the entire playlist here.

“A novel of sonorous character study, showing both the limits and allure of truly knowing another person—and oneself.” You can read the full review here. 

“I think about how the relationship between the characters in my novel might somehow mirror the relationship between reader and characters—how readers might, at times, love a character only to feel betrayed by them in a later chapter when they behave selfishly or out of spite. Or how a reader might loathe a character for her spinelessness only to feel surprised and drawn in by her bravery in a later scene. Rather than a singular line of identification, some long-lasting friendships require a bit of messiness or unpredictability—and distance.” You can read the entire essay here. 

“Stories of Another Civil War”

This often fascinating and always carefully linked collection of stories shows the effect of such devastating civil war not only on a country, but on individuals. We see families scared, on edge, and broken by war, and we see outsiders—often volunteers from America like Luloff was—becoming entangled in the war and loss, as well.

Full review

Joanna Luloff’s debut collection, The Beach at Galle Road (Algonquin), meticulously avoids the fighting in its depiction of wartime Sri Lanka. Students, teachers, innkeepers, and a few foreign travelers do their best to keep up some semblance of hope against increasingly troubling news from the island’s restive north.

Full review

“In The Beach at Galle Road Joanna Luloff portrays, with exquisite passion and restraint, the troubled history of Sri Lanka. Writing from the point of view of young and old, Sri Lankans and Americans, civilians and soldiers, Luloff takes us deep into a country and a culture. Together these wonderful stories form an intricate web in which we, her readers, are happily caught. The Beach at Galle Road is a wise and profoundly moving debut.”
–Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

In her debut, Luloff weaves a montage of stories into a cohesive whole as she explores the roles of tradition and family and the destructive power of war through the lives of each character…

Full review

Luloff, a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, has written an engaging and thought-provoking collection of interconnected stories which shed a very personal light on the civil war in that country. By means of her vibrant characters, the author conveys a real sense of the fragile state in which Sri Lanka existed during the nearly 25 years in which the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils fought for control of the government. One story focuses on Janaki, whose sister travels from a refugee camp in the north, where most of the fighting took place, to live with her and her husband, a Tamil sympathizer now missing. Sam, an English teacher with the Peace Corps, falls in love with one of his students from the north — which comes to affect his own safety. Lucy, another Peace Corps volunteer leaves the south and joins a UN group administering to refugees in Jaffna, many of whom have lost family members to the war. Woven together, these stories reveal the realities behind the headlines, and provide a gripping read.