Good Reads Q&A: A Tale of Two Friends, Told Across Cultures and Decades

Reena Shah wrote, then scrapped, her first novel when she was 23 years old. Twenty years later, she wrote her second. In between, she danced professionally for years, taught in public schools around the world, and started a family. When that second novel, Every Happiness, finally published as her debut in February 2026, Shah had plenty of stories to tell. In fact, Every Happiness began as a short story, which she developed into a longer work at the Michener Center for Writers. The book follows two women as they grow up and emigrate from Mumbai to Connecticut—a fraught and nuanced relationship with challenges that span decades and cultures.  

The Alcalde spoke with Shah, MFA ’25, about female friendship, complicated characters, and her path to the page.  

How did you find your way back to writing?  

I was hiding from fiction for a long time. It’s scary. There is rejection baked into the process, and I had not accepted that: You’re going to fail, and you’re going to fail in public, and that’s part of it. It wasn’t until I had my kids, when I had no time, that I was like, Okay, I only have 15 minutes at a time. This is the perfect time to write.  

One of the things Elizabeth McCracken taught me [at Michener] was that you learn how you work as a writer, and you have to figure that out for yourself. Motherhood put a crunch on my time in a way that focused me. I started caring a little less about where the writing was going to go. Every rejection hurts, but the heartbreak had to end quickly for me because I had other things to worry about.  

Early acclaim for the book praised your character development. How do you build characters who are lovable, yet nuanced?  

I had to get out of the way of the characters. It took me a while to do that. I wanted Deepa to be the villain because I wanted to show how wrong she was. Once I got rid of my judgments—toward her in particular, but even toward Ruchi and their husbands and their children—that’s when the characters became much more present for me. It became easier in some ways to write, and then also harder because I was so preoccupied with them, even when I wasn’t writing.  

What interested you about their friendship?  

Once I realized that Deepa was not just a foil for Ruchi, I became very interested in a friendship between these two women that was complicated and tense, with competition and desire and all these different things living inside it. Deepa has a lot of love for her friend, even though it’s hard for her to express.  

I was also thinking about the generation of women above me and how much silence they had in their lives, trying to fulfill unrealistic expectations both from within the South Asian immigrant community and outside of it … I wanted to give these two characters permission to be messy with each other.  

How does your dance training influence your writing?  

I studied a classical North Indian dance called kathak. It’s a very particular form, and I think it made me really attuned to gesture. The intimacy in this book—a lot of it happens in gestures, [such as] putting somebody’s hair behind their ears, because these are women who are starved of touch. There was such a sensitivity in their fingertips.  

I also did so much rewriting for this book. With writing, you have a physical draft, right? It feels more like a solid thing—and more precious, in some ways—but it’s really just practice. And with dance, you have all these hours of practice, and then even once you’re good enough to perform, you have to do so many hours of rehearsal. In every rehearsal, you’re essentially rewriting whatever came before. It’s not that it feels easier, but it feels more acceptable and less visible. It has its own way of being hard, I guess.  

The novel deals with issues that could have been pulled straight out of the news cycle, but it doesn’t feel overtly “political” at all. Were you thinking about that as you were writing?  

I didn’t set out to write about class or immigration. I know other writers can work more conceptually, and I’m amazed by that. But when I set out to do that, it feels very polemical. And one of the things I love about fiction is that it’s about nuance and complication; it’s not simple. The characters are living in time and space, and they’re interacting with what can seem like an abstract issue, like class—but how does it actually show up in their lives?  

That issue in particular came from the characters: There is a class difference between Ruchi and Deepa, and it affects how they show up for each other or don’t show up for each other, their desires and their jealousies. I think for me it’s about the truth of the characters, as opposed to something I set out to write about.  

I also didn’t want to write a novel that spanned 50 to 60 years. I was not going for that. But that’s what happened. My children grew up with this novel, and I grew as a writer with these characters, and I just—I love them. I hope people can love them despite, or even because of, their flaws.  

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

CREDIT: Courtesy of Reena Shah.