Indies Introduce Q&A with Reena Shah

Reena Shah is the author of Every Happiness, a Winter/Spring 2026 Indies Introduce selection. 

Cassie Goodwin of Loudmouth Books in Indianapolis, Indiana, served on the panel that selected Shah's book for Indies Introduce.

“Every Happiness is a stunning and unflinching debut! Amidst its luminescent prose, you will find complex, flawed characters you can’t help but root for and themes that come alive on the page. The longing Reena Shah infused into every word is so painfully potent that it blurs the line between reader and character,” said Goodwin.

Shah sat down with Goodwin to discuss her debut title. This is a transcript of their discussion. You can listen to the interview on the ABA podcast, BookED.

Cassie Goodwin: Hello! I am Cassie Goodwin from Loudmouth Books in Indianapolis, Indiana. I’m here with Reena Shah, who is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, the BBC, Electric Literature, Joyland, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Millay Arts, Tin House, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and more. She received an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers. She lives on Roosevelt Island in New York with her family and teaches in a public school.

Thanks so much for being here, Reena! It’s such a pleasure to have you.

Reena Shah: Thank you for having me, Cassie. I'm so excited!

CG: Yes, I'm excited as well! When we were reading through our many manuscripts, Every Happiness really stood out to me — I loved it and I'm so glad I get to talk with you about it.

RS: Thank you so much. I am so grateful to Loudmouth Books, to all the indie bookstores, and to the American Booksellers Association, for lifting up the voices of debut authors and creating this platform with such warmth and enthusiasm.

Some of my favorite places in the world are independent bookstores, and they're so important right now and they’re the kinds of communities that we need more of. Thank you for the work that you do.

CG: It’s a pleasure, honestly. There is a theme that we see throughout the entire story, where all of the characters, in their own ways, are grappling with a hunger or yearning. They have a hunger for forbidden love, for acceptance, for success, for knowing the people they care about and for being known. What drove you to instill that in your characters?

RS: I love your reading of these characters and this characterization of longing as hunger. I can't say that I consciously made that choice as I was writing. I was just following these characters and trying to not impose my judgment on them. I really want to try to let them lead, and it's been a long process of doing that.

I think the hunger comes from the very first impulse of the story. It actually started as a short story, and it was really focused on Ruchi and Moksh, the mother and the son. That's where it started. I was really interested in their exterior and their interior — as all characters and people have — and how they're in conflict with each other. For these characters, that conflict is really high; how they're perceived, how they act, what they say is very different from what they feel inside. Some of them feel that their exterior is meeker than they actually feel inside, or some of them feel that their exterior is bolder or that it's less loving on the outside, when actually inside, they feel a lot of love for each other.

Though this started with Ruchi and Moksh, it eventually became focused on the two friends, what really stayed was their longing and their hunger — their desire for conflicting things. In that initial short story, Deepa, the other protagonist, was a side character at the time. Even though the story went from a short story to a novel, and some aspects went through many changes, the thing that stayed was that hunger.

That hunger became the core, even though I didn't realize it at the time. At the time, it was just what the characters’ interiority was. That hunger was coming from different places as well; it was coming from things that were imposed on them, but it was also coming from themselves. There is conflict between their interior and exterior, and they want to make those things match.

These are people who have images of what their life should be like and what they should be like, and it doesn't quite match what they're finding, especially once they immigrate to the United States. It leaves them really unsatisfied. They want more but they don't know how to express that with each other or with the world.

CG: That was so clear from what we saw in the characters, how you would read their thoughts, and they would have all this love and this yearning to connect and then their actions would not match up. That was so painful to read and also so powerful. You nailed it for sure.

Connecting to something you said earlier, when you talked about not judging your characters, you absolutely did not shy away from showing the flaws in your characters, especially your main characters Deepa and Ruchi. Yet, as a reader, we still felt like so sympathetic for these characters and so connected to them. We were rooting for them despite the many flaws that we saw. Did you find it difficult to strike that balance when you were fleshing them out?

RS: I'm so glad you see that, because I feel like these are characters that people have strong feelings about. At least for me, I have really strong feelings about them and I love them. I've grown to love them. But I have to say that at the start, I think Deepa was more of a foil in the beginning for Ruchi. I went to an artist residency, and there was an instructor there who tore apart the story and he gave me two pieces of advice. He said that this is not a short story, these characters deserve more space, and he said that Deepa is not a villain.

I had to really sit with that; she is manipulative and she can be biting and she can be judgmental, but she's not a villain. I realized that part of me wanted her to be a villain. I wanted to place all of Ruchi’s pain and her disappointments at her feet, and I realized that wasn't fair to Deepa, because she was not responsible for all of them and she was a real person.

Once I stopped trying to push that narrative on Deepa, the relationship between the two characters, and reaching Deepa, became the core of Every Happiness. That's when I found the novel. I discovered that underneath Deepa’s judgments and her slights and those mean little things she says, is really a desire to protect Ruchi, herself, and her daughter. It’s really human, it’s something that I think if we all really scratch the surface, it's there in us too. At least I see it myself.

CG: They were very relatable, in a lot of ways. It was such an interesting dynamic. It was really interesting how you showed their growth from children to adults and into having children, and the ways that their relationships with their mothers affected them, and then their relationships with their children. It was just a wonderful course of events and consequences throughout the book that connected so well.

Another thing that is very present in this book is the realities and the various experiences that the characters have after immigrating to America. Can you talk more [about] that and why you made that such a big part of their stories?

RS: I'm a first generation American. I was one of the first members of my family to be born in the United States, and that experience really has shaped me in a lot of ways. It shaped my identity, and it's a big part of my search for home. My family also immigrated within India from the villages to the city, and so I’ve always been really interested in that experience of moving.

It's a really powerful thing to leave home and to move with the hope of building something new. You have to have a fantasy about that. You have to have dreams. You go to that place trying to imagine yourself in it. You’re almost imagining your fictional self, because it's all unknown. It’s really disorienting starting anew. You’re wanting to belong, wanting to preserve who you are, but not really being able to imagine who that person is in this new setting.

When I was growing up, we were the only South Asian family in my town at that time. In trying to preserve their culture, my parents — and perhaps especially the women in my family — really pushed a narrow image of what it meant to be Indian-American, and I pushed back. I was a tough teen, and I will say that the writing of Every Happiness has really helped me understand their experiences.

My parents are very different from these characters — this is fiction — but I see how money and class and competition and marriage and parenthood weighed these parents, families, and people down, and how immigration cut them off from part of themselves, and how much they had to find themselves again. Writing this book, I really appreciated how in that experience, there was fierce love there, and how in some ways, the unrealistic expectations or criticisms or silences were their ways of, again, protecting or preserving who they are.

CG: I could see that in the story for sure. There were so many moments where they would talk about their hopes and their dreams or what they imagined was going to happen, like, “If I achieve this, this will happen, and we'll have this connection or I'll have this relationship.” Then when they did realize those things, they were left with a reality that it is different than their dream. That’s very true to life, especially [in] America.

RS: I'm thinking about it a lot today, with everything that's going on, and how that wanting to feel at home is so essential to everyone, whether you've immigrated somewhere or you haven't. If you've immigrated somewhere, it’s much harder because you're so different from that place. What I'm hoping is that this book will help readers feel inside that experience and have empathy for that experience.

CG: I personally think you nailed it, so I think that'll be the takeaway for readers. If you had advice for Deepa and Ruchi, what would that advice be?

RS: They behave badly to different degrees — we all do to different degrees — so I have so much advice for them. There's a piece of advice I would give each of them, and then there's a piece of advice I'd give both of them. To Ruchi, I would say, “Set some boundaries, say no sometimes.” With Deepa, I would tell her to do the opposite, “Say yes and be more generous with your feelings.”

Advice I give myself at different times, and the advice I would give to both of them is, “Speak directly. Say what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. Do not be afraid of those words and that intimacy.” They want intimacy so badly. Just the idea of touch — what I hope readers feel is how even the slightest touch for them becomes so meaningful because they are withholding so much touch and they're also withholding so many words. There are times in my head, I'm just like screaming at them in my mind, like, “Just say it!”

CG: Yes!

RS: Because you're not always going to have the opportunity to say that thing.

CG: As a reader, that was definitely the experience. There were so many times where I was just like, “Tell her! Use your words!” when that yearning would reach this pinnacle, [with] a single touch or glance or eye contact. It was a masterpiece in yearning and desire and longing. I can talk about that forever.

You mentioned that this was a short story and it grew into a novel. You've had experience before writing and publishing short fiction, journalism, and now your debut novel. Has the process been different as you've done those different types of writing, or has it been the same in a lot of ways? Do you have a preference?

RS: I find writing so mysterious, because I do feel like it's so different depending on what kind of writing you're doing. I wrote this as a short story first, and then it became linked stories. I'm like, “Okay, I'll just write about these characters’ linked stories. I don't have to have a through line.” Then the through lines started to emerge, and it became a novel in stories. It was like a safety net where I could cheat-trick myself into writing a novel. I was really overwhelmed by the idea of writing a novel. I didn't know how to do it. I don't know if anyone really does until you're doing it, I think that's what I've learned.

While I was working on Every Happiness, I was also working as a freelance journalist. I was living in Costa Rica with my family and I was pitching articles. That was a very different kind of writing. When I would work on an article, I would immerse myself in that world for sometimes weeks at a time, a month, and I was working on a deadline. During that time, I couldn't work on the novel. It was all about the article, and when I wasn't working on the articles, I was with my family, but it really taught me something about myself as a writer. There were two things I learned. Having some space from this novel was really helpful, so I could see the characters more clearly. And I am a writer who needs deadlines.

I hate saying that because deadlines stress me out, but I think when I have a lot of time, I can fiddle for a long time. I can do chores and hide from the writing. I really started writing after I had kids, which seems like a weird time to start writing — I had so little time — and there was something about having that compression of time that made it possible for me to write fiction. With journalism, just knowing that I could meet that deadline and I could work in that compressed time period, it helped me create that when I was writing fiction.

CG: As someone who loves to go right up to a deadline, I understand the need for structure or a hard time limit. It's so impressive to me for people who have children and families that they have to care for, and jobs, and are also writing a book. It’s working, whatever you're doing, keep it up!

RS: Thank you. I appreciate that.

CG: Thank you so much for being here today. It's been a pleasure to read Every Happiness and to meet you and get to talk, I really appreciate that.

RS: I really appreciate you. Cassie. Thank you for reading Every Happiness early, and thank you for choosing it for Indies Introduce and for caring for these characters. I hope I can visit Loudmouth Books someday!

CG: Yes, please do. We would love to have you!

RS: Thank you so much, and thank you to the American Booksellers Association.

Every Happiness by Reena Shah (Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781639733002, HC, Fiction, $28.99, On Sale: 02/03/26)

You can learn more about this author at reenadshah.com.