“All This Could Be Different,” A Radiant Portrait of a Young, Queer, Immigrant Woman

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This novel is as vibrant as its cover, alive and awash with people and love. Its first chapters begin in a rhythm that is clipped and clear, the beat of it ticking along like a clock until suddenly, it shatters, lurching into the life of a young, queer, Indian woman. All This Could Be Different (Viking) by Sarah Thankam Mathews — longlisted for the 2022 National Book Awards: Fiction — captures the complexity of identity and the duality of being young, brown, an immigrant, a daughter, a lesbian and a woman. 

A PORTRAIT OF TIME AND PLACE

Set after Obama is elected to a second term, while the effects of the recession are lingering, this novel is placed within a shifting political climate. It ends a few years after the legalization of gay marriage, at the brink of jarring and dangerous changes in the world. 

At 14, the narrator moved from India to America with her parents. India, she says upon revisiting, is beautiful but immodest, “a hot place with red soil, where everything bursts with life.” At 22, she finds herself in cold, unfamiliar Milwaukee for a job, completely alone, her parents deported and two oceans away. 

She struggles to stay afloat, coping with the meaning of her existence as a queer, brown woman in America. The friends she meets are complicated people with their own flaws and dreams of a different future. At times, their identities and histories cause friction — they grow jealous, their views contradict — but still, they care for one another.

EXPLORATION OF IDENTITY

We don’t learn the narrator’s name, Sneha, until halfway through the book, but all the while we feel her desire, her shame, her loneliness and her hunger for belonging. Sneha is terrified of opening up and being seen one way by her American friends or lovers and another by her Indian family. She must learn to find the middle ground between who she has been, who she’s told she should be, and who she wants to become. She’s torn between wanting to be loved and wanting to be known. Her fear is that love will be conditional.

But lingering, regardless, within the story is the love she fears she doesn’t deserve. “What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.” At her lowest points — of poverty, heartbreak, vulnerability — someone is gentle with her, picking her up off the ground and dusting her off, reminding her they will always be there.

COULD ALL THIS BE DIFFERENT?

The question echoing at the heart of this novel, in the pit of the narrator’s stomach, is what if. “All of this, the very facts of who I was, could be different. I could be a person refigured: warm, charming, loving, loved.” If only things were different — if Sneha had been born a different person, not survived the same things, not met the same people, or made the same decisions.

The title All This Could Be Different also refers to America, to the future the narrator and her friends dream up for themselves. America first appears as an individualistic society, its values different from the entangled community and family ideals of the India Sneha knows. But a group of friends that believes in the power of community, mutual aid and caring for one another, proves to Sneha that a radical solution to collective problems is possible, and the world can be remade.

HOPEFUL AND BITTERSWEET

So many stories — this one included — remind us of the joys of being young and queer. But few are able to paint such an accurate portrait of the uncertainty, shame and isolation that so often have to be conquered, or at least endured, in order to make your life your own. 

All This Could Be Different does that and more, capturing the bittersweet feelings of growing up, clinging to your childhood, finding and losing love in all its forms. It’s a novel about people and interdependence, and the journey we go on to make a home.

About Sarah Thankam Mathews:

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She is a recipient of a Best American Short Stories 2020 award and fellowships from the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Iowa Writers Workshop. All This Could Be Different is her first novel.

Author: Sarah Thankam Mathews