'I lost all confidence as a writer': Brick Lane author Monica Ali releases first novel in a decade

SINGAPORE - It has been more than a decade since British novelist Monica Ali, best known for her 2003 debut Brick Lane, last released a novel.

In between books, she was raising two children, volunteering and trying her hand at scriptwriting. But for some time after her last novel, Untold Story (2011), she was also depressed.

"There was a period when I just lost all confidence as a writer," Ali, 54, says over Zoom from her home in London.

"I just stopped writing. And then, when I wasn't writing, I got depressed and the depression made me lose confidence even more. It was a downward spiral, in that sense. But I came out of it."

The new novel, Love Marriage, took Ali four years to write. She is also adapting it for a television series with production company New Pictures, in development with the BBC.

In the story, which unfolds in London after the Brexit vote, junior doctor Yasmin Ghorami is engaged to fellow medic Joe Sangster and their parents are about to meet for the first time.

The Ghoramis are a prim-and-proper immigrant family, while Harriet, Joe's single mother, is an outlandish feminist author who posed nude in her younger days. But the romantic comedy of the opening soon gives way to unexpected twists.

Yasmin makes assumptions about the people around her, but is often proven wrong. Harriet, who is well-meaning but a little intrusive, also comes across as a bit of a modern-day Jane Austen character.

Ali is a fan of Austen's novels. Her favourite is Emma because "it's the funniest".

Sex - infidelity, revenge sex, sexual addiction and violence - is a big part of Love Marriage. In the Ghorami household, sex is never mentioned - or so readers are told at the start of the novel.

Asked if sex was talked about at home when she was growing up, Ali laughs. "Are you joking? No, never."

Ali was born in Dhaka to a Bengali father and English mother. She moved to Britain at age three and studied politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford.

She is married to management consultant Simon Torrance. Their daughter Shumi, 21, and son Felix, 22, are now in university.

She made waves with her best-selling debut Brick Lane (buy here, borrow here), about a Bangladeshi teenager who moves to London after an arranged marriage to an older man. It was nominated for the 2003 Man Booker prize and made into a movie.

Her next three books, however, met with mixed reviews. They are Alentejo Blue (2006), set in a Portuguese village; In The Kitchen (2009), about a chef in a London hotel; and Untold Story, which imagines what happens after a character very much like Princess Diana fakes her death and escapes to America.

One critic, whom Ali still quotes today, said Untold Story seemed like "a curious marriage of author and subject". Another called it "bewildering".

Ali looks uncomfortable when asked if her "downward spiral" was triggered by the response to her last book, as some news outlets have suggested. "I don't think it's the right way of describing it at all. It's complicated."

The issue has taken her years of therapy to untangle. "I think what was difficult is my perception, whether this is right or wrong, that my authenticity was being questioned.

"I get this question very often - 'Are you trying to get away from Brick Lane?' And what would that mean - that I'm trying to get away from my ethnicity or my skin colour? It's a bizarre question, and quite insulting when you really think about it."

What it felt like, she says, was an "obliteration of the self".

"I think it happens with writers of colour. To be 'authentic', people have very particular expectations about what those voices should be saying or writing. It means you are not credited with imagination, creativity, intelligence or the ability to research."

One thing that was good for her mental health was learning scriptwriting, which she started seven years ago. It sparked the joy of writing again. She also practised Vedic meditation.

"I'm not one thing or the other," she says of her Bangladeshi and English heritage. "I am both."

• Love Marriage ($32.95) is available here.