Sopan Deb Discusses the Motivations Behind His Writing
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 10 Jun, 2025

Acclaimed author, playwright, and New York Times journalist Sopan Deb will write about anything he finds interesting. At the same time, he sees the importance of focusing on South Asian stories.

Romen Borsellino (00:00)

I am Romen Borsellino and we are here with our guest Sopan Deb. Sopan is an incredibly accomplished writer. He works for the New York Times has written several books, including an autobiography called Missed Translations and a novel called Keya Das's Second Act. And Sopan also has gotten into playwriting recently and has plays appearing at different festivals this summer, including New York Stage and Film. Sopan, welcome.

Sopan Deb (00:31)

Thank you for having me, very excited to be here.

Romen Borsellino (00:33)

You have written about a number of different topics. Some include very newsy things. You covered President Trump's campaign back in 2016 when You've written, as we mentioned, novels, plays. You write about pop culture trends, everything. What are your favorite topics to write about?

Sopan Deb (00:51)

So I don't have any favorite one topic. My basic bar for writing stories is coming across something. And if my brain goes, huh, I go, OK, there's probably a story there. And so an example of this, one of the ones I'm kind of most known for is I got a reader email once asking me what's up with Cookie Monster's cookies.

And that was like the end of the email and I never thought about it before and I go, huh, you know what? I don't have an answer to that question and I want to find out. And so I literally just reached out to Sesame Street and I asked them, hey, can you put me on with some Cookie Monster people because what's up with those cookies he eats? And I wrote a story on that and ended up being one of my most read in my career. so, you know, I write on anything and everything ranging from culture to sports but the basic bar is things that just make me go, huh.

Romen Borsellino (01:49)

And that was a very funny piece, by the way. I remember a line, something along the lines of, me want cookies? No, me want cookies.

Sopan Deb (01:56)

And that wasn't even a Cookie Monster reference. That's just how I write.

Romen Borsellino (01:58)

Yeah, that I think maybe was that even in the New York Times article? That might have just been a private email you sent to me.

Sopan Deb (02:04)

Yeah, that's right.

Romen Borsellino (02:06)

I wanted to also talk a little bit about identity. You, like me, are South Asian. Can you tell us a little more specifically about your family background?

Sopan Deb (02:17)

Dad was born in what was then East Pakistan and grew up in Bangladesh and then moved to Kolkata as a teenager. My mom is from Dharpur, grew up there. My mom emigrated to Canada in the late 60s, early 70s.

My dad immigrated to Rochester in the early 70s. met, they were arranged to get married through a newspaper in 1975. And then they moved to New Jersey eventually. I was born outside of Boston, grew up in New Jersey, but my parents are both Bengali. And, you know, in bringing me up, they only spoke to me in Bengali, so I grew up bilingual and we had Indian food every single night. In my early part of my childhood, up and through my teenage, we used to go to pujas every year. They essentially gave me a pretty good cultural route growing up, essentially.

Romen Borsellino (03:28)

I really appreciated that answer because ⁓ I truly thought maybe, well, most people would have probably given me a two second answer. It's like, yeah, my parents are South Indian or, yeah, my parents are from, so thank you for the thought that went into that. And it's actually very, it makes sense and it's interesting for us to hear because you talk about similar topics in your book. For example, you know, I, despite being an Indian, I didn't know a ton about pujas.

Sopan Deb (03:41)

Yeah, of course.

Romen Borsellino (03:56)

I learned a lot about them from reading your book, Keya Das's Second Act, a novel about actually, I'll let you – do you mind giving me the quick synopsis, giving us the quick synopsis of what Keya Das's Second Act is about?

Sopan Deb (04:11)

Sure. Why don't I just get the book and we just kind of read it for a while.

Romen Borsellino (04:15)

Yeah, yeah, we have a, we have another eight hours left on this podcast. So.

Sopan Deb (04:20)

No, the book is about a Bengali family in New Jersey split apart by grief at the loss of their teenage daughter, Keya, and they find a manuscript of a play she wrote and decide to stage it. So it's a book about theater, it's a book about overcoming grief, and it's about forgiveness. It's also a book about, you know, cultural identity and, you know, other themes as well.

I'm proud of the book. I'm really excited that I did a novel, that I get to call myself a novelist for the rest of my life. Whether I'm a good novelist or not is, that's for other people, but I get to call myself a novelist.

Romen Borsellino (05:04)

I have read the book and I will personally call you a good novelist, but I am just some guy. But as I mentioned, the book talks about pujas and it talks about a lot of very specific things to a specific culture that is not necessarily accessible to any single person who reads it, right? Like to some degree, it requires some knowledge. How did you make that decision of, well, I'm either gonna explain this to people who might not be familiar or I'm gonna present my culture in a way that either folks get it or they don't, or maybe they learn something along the way

Sopan Deb (05:44)

That's a great question. And it's kind of an interesting discussion among authors and writers about how to do this. Some writers, you know, care less about the audience and just write it and go, if you don't understand it, that's on you. I was somewhere in the middle. So for example, some of the dialogue is Bengali. Some of it is not. I want to give just enough that the reader has a general understanding of what is going on without spelling out everything. So as long as you understand generally what is going on, I'm okay with that. That doesn't mean I'm going to, sorry, that doesn't mean I'm going to spell it out and say like, and spend a lot of time and interrupt the flow of writing so I can spell out cultural things. I don't feel the need to do that. But, you know, some readers didn't like that I didn't explain everything.

Romen Borsellino (06:43)

Really, could you give an example of what type of feedback you got on that?

Sopan Deb (06:47)

Just dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue entire sentences were in English and I didn't translate it. And that's fine. I can understand people not liking that.

Romen Borsellino (06:59)

Right, and so on that same topic: a lot of your creative works, your books, your plays, they all focus on, for the most part, South Asians. What has driven that specific choice? You are, of course, South Asian, but is it that you want to write what you know? That you want to use this opportunity to honor your culture?

Sopan Deb (07:24)

It's a great question and it's something I grapple with quite a bit of like is it every time I write, I'm writing on South Asian families and stories, etcetera? One thing is that I feel a little bit of an obligation to, because if South Asian writers don't write South Asian stories, then nobody's going to write them. And that means, you know, actors and etc who would have trouble otherwise getting cast don't get roles and if we're not telling those stories no one's telling those stories. That's the first thing. The second thing is I don't consciously try. It's not like I sit down from my computer and I'm going write a South Asian story today. That's not how I approach it. That's the idea I have and I write it down.

It just so happens that it's been what I've been interested in writing about. It's not the only thing I've been interested in writing about, but it's been a lot of what I've been interested in writing about. And so I don't really consciously try to do it. It's just, you know, maybe there's a subconscious need to like write about the things that I'm most familiar with. And in some of it certainly is a basic, write what you know. And that may seem like a cop out, but it's…

kind of true and a lot of what I write, I want to bring as much specificity and authenticity to stuff I write as possible. And it's probably something I need to work on as a writer to break out of that shell.

Romen Borsellino (09:03)

It's interesting you mentioned, you know, if you don't write about this, if South Asians don't write about it, who's going to? Let's say that a white guy writes some version of Keya Das's second act about a Bengali family. Do you think that's problematic?

Sopan Deb (09:24)

It's a more complex answer because we came across this with American Dirt, the novel a couple years ago. Takes place in Mexico, involves characters of Mexican descent, but was written by a white woman. And the book got a lot of great reviews and got a huge advance and all that stuff. But also it was a lot about Mexican trauma, if I recall correctly. I never read the book, so I'm not the expert on this. But it got a lot of criticism.

I think it ended up. Oprah ended up being involved somehow because I think she put it on her book club list and they got a lot of blowback and then ended up being a whole thing. I don't inherently have a problem with writers centering other ethnicities in their writing. I don't inherently have a problem with that. Not necessarily. The challenge becomes is the things like investment, know, pay, that kind of stuff.

So for example, if a white writer wrote Keya Das, that writer is more than likely to get a higher advance, get more marketing, get better PR, know, more PR, get more book editors interested. So it's less about the individual project and more about the system as a whole, you know? And so I don't think that people should be put in a box as a writer. And so no, I wouldn't have a problem with, you know a white writer writing a novel of Bengali people if they do the research and do it in a way that pays the story care. Because it'll be hypocritical for me to say, I don't think white people should be writing about Bengali families or black families or whatever. Because then the natural outgrowth of that is that people will tell me, you can only write about Bengali families.

And that's not fair. So I'm not one of those people. However, what I wish is that there was a little bit more equity in the kind of projects that the system will take a risk on. Because a lot of writers who are not white are considered risks in the marketplace. They're less likely to have their projects bought, whether it's in TV, film, theater, whatever.

It's, you know, artistically, there have been, it's been a more challenging time for decades. It's been a systemic thing, right? And that's the core of the, if a white person were create a Keya Das thing. It's not about the one project, it's about the systemic kind of easier path that white writers have often had in publishing that people who look like me or people who look like you, you know, don't have, if that makes sense.

Romen Borsellino (12:29)

Wow, thank you for that answer. That was truly more thoughtful and nuanced than anything I could have ever imagined. Yeah, I was looking for a yes or no, a simple yes or no. kidding. But no, thank you truly. That gives me a lot to think about. I wanna ask you just your name is Sopan Deb. That's not a question, that is a statement of fact. But I

Sopan Deb (12:39)

Yes on that one, that's a yes.

Romen Borsellino (12:53)

Yeah. Okay. That's the thumbs up. I have heard, people almost try and exoticize your name, right? I've heard people be like, "SOPAHN DAYB", how does that make you feel?

Sopan Deb (13:05)

It doesn't really bother me. mean, I mispronounce people's names. Your name is Romen. How many people have called you Roman in your life? You know, and

Romen Borsellino (13:14)

99 % of people who have ever called me anything have called me Roman. I ask you though, not just from a standard name pronunciation, but

Sopan Deb (13:20)

Yeah, it doesn't bother me because the truth is there are other Sopans in the world who pronounce it in the more, you know, traditional Indian way. I pronounce mine in a very kind of quote unquote, you know, anglicized way. And the only reason I do that is not for any reason other than my name is spelled S-O-P-A-N. You have a so and then you have a pan, you put it together.

It just makes sense, like to me, for everyone's ease to just say Sopan. That's how, if you put those two words together, it's Sopan, it makes sense. And it has still somehow managed to flummox a lot of people over the years, but it's never been anything, there was never a cultural reason. Like my parents don't call me Sopan, they call me Sho-pan. That's how they pronounce it.

Romen Borsellino (14:17)

Wow, I didn't realize that.

Sopan Deb (14:20)

Yeah, I mean, I was the one who kind of made the decision to pronounce it so pan, but it's not because I was like running from my culture or anything like that. was just.

Romen Borsellino (14:25)

Did they have feelings about that, your parents?

Sopan Deb (14:28)

No, and the reason for that is that they don't even use… So Every Bengali person has a good name, palanam, or a daknam, which is your nickname.

So parents typically address you by your daknam, your nickname. So my whole life, my parents have called me Shambho. If they're introducing me in front of strangers, then I'm Shopan. But with everybody, with family, with me, they only call me Shambho. That's my daknam, that's my nickname. My good name, or in Bengali translation, palanam, is Sopan, is Shopan.

But my parents have only historically called me Shambo. So they never had occasion to call me by my quote unquote good name. And you remember the namesake, this was the whole thing with Gogol or whatever, with Kal Penn's character in that movie. So it never came up because they don't call me Sopan. They don't even call me Shopan. They just call me Shambo by nickname they've called me by my whole life.

Romen Borsellino (15:34)

Right. I think what is particularly interesting about that answer is that I think it's something every culture can relate to in some way. Whether, you know, in the same way, for example, that we call our elders auntie and uncle, everyone has their own version of that, even if it's not a carbon copy. I guarantee you that everyone listening will be like, yeah, that translates to XYZ in my own culture. So I can totally relate to that.

Sopan Deb (16:00)

Yeah, totally, totally.

Romen Borsellino (16:06)

Really one more question I wanted to ask you and I'll sort of give you my own answer for context before I even ask you. It's a question about identity and feeling most in touch with our identity. I grew up in Iowa, a totally white state. I went to school at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

And then eventually I moved to Hollywood. I would say that when I got to Hollywood was the most I had ever felt immersed with my culture, with South Asian culture. There was just this big community of South Asians. And that was to me sort of this this moment of like, I really want to lean into this. This is really important to me in a way that I never fully realized. Has there been a point in your life where you felt that, the particular desire to embrace your culture? Has that been more recently?

Sopan Deb (16:53)

It's definitely more recent. It first started when I started doing the book project to reconnect with my parents who I hadn't seen in a long time. But it really, I would say, kicked into gear after I got married and then my wife got pregnant. My son is now 15 months.

I'm not saying that he has to embrace, you know, every single part of who I am, but I want to give him the base like my parents gave me. And then he can choose how much he engages or how little he engages as he gets older. But he's not going to be able to engage with being his Bengali side without knowing what being Bengali means. Or he's not going be able to know what it means to be Indian without me instilling some of that in him. And so as I got older, I kind transitioned to the state of life where I'm middle-aged and I'm thinking a lot more about the kind of values I want to instill in my son and that kind of stuff. And so once I did the book, which, the book came out in 2020, I was in my early thirties at that point. That's when I started meeting other South Asians. I kind of like awoke something inside of me.

And then once I married my wife and here's thing, if I don't instill him with with any of these values. I don't mean values, I mean knowledge. Here's where you come from. "Here's what a puja is." We did a first rites ceremony for him. If I don't teach him about those customs and rituals, he's never gonna get that stuff. I don't want him to miss out on that. Now if in 20 years he says, man, this is a waste of my time, I don't wanna be doing this, okay, that's fine. But as long as you know where you come

Because for me, I grew up with it, went away from it, and then found my way back to it. For Kiran, if he grows up with it, he can go away from it, but maybe he comes back to it. But if he doesn't grow up with it at all, then he has nothing to come back to. And so that's kind of where it is for me.

And everyone has their own journey with this stuff, and mine has been a long and winding road. But, you know, being a parent and just getting older has really changed how I look at this stuff.

Romen Borsellino (19:30)

Well, Kiren is a lucky little man. And I think one of the things that's so cool about that is that in the process of your wanting to pass those things down to him, you are passing them down to the rest of us and to your readers as well. And that's really special for all of us. So this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much, Sopan and anyone who wants to get to know more about you should check out your books and look you up in the New York Times.

Sopan Deb (20:01)

Thanks dude, happy to do this.

Romen Borsellino (20:04)

Of course. Thank you so much.

"I don't consciously try. It's not like I sit down from my computer and I'm going write a South Asian story today. That's not how I approach it."

Photo by Amy Lombard

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Sopan Deb Discusses the Motivations Behind His Writing
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 10 Jun, 2025

Acclaimed author, playwright, and New York Times journalist Sopan Deb will write about anything he finds interesting. At the same time, he sees the importance of focusing on South Asian stories.

"I don't consciously try. It's not like I sit down from my computer and I'm going write a South Asian story today. That's not how I approach it."

Articles

Subscribe

Subscribe Now to receive Goldsea updates!

Sopan Deb Discusses the Motivations Behind His WritingBy Romen Basu Borsellino | 10 Jun, 2025

Acclaimed author, playwright, and New York Times journalist Sopan Deb will write about anything he finds interesting. At the same time, he sees the importance of focusing on South Asian stories.

"I don't consciously try. It's not like I sit down from my computer and I'm going write a South Asian story today. That's not how I approach it."

Articles

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Sopan Deb Discusses the Motivations Behind His Writing
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 10 Jun, 2025