I’ve known Puloma Ghosh since we were ten years old. I am a writer because she is a writer. Our lives as writers have informed one another, starting off with trading off notebooks in the high school cafeteria with bizarre prompts inside, staying up too late watching messed up movies, screaming to Rilo Kiley in college, and now being proud of our work but slightly ashamed to share it with our mothers.
We are both fascinated by horror and the uncanny, but approach it in different ways. I do a finger-guns approach to horror; I like how much a laugh can sound like a scream. Her writing, however, feels like a long nail stroking me on the cheek: sensual and entrancing, but where the hell did the nail come from and is it going to hurt me? A scream, for her, can come from fear or pleasure.
has this and more, expertly teetering the line between desire and fear. There are werewolf pandemics, autopsies of lovers, holes at parties. There are human sacrifices.
Her prose is meticulous, sharp, tender and shocking. Ahead of June release, I got to speak with my best friend about her debut collection. We talked about generational grief, being attracted to cosmic beings, the burden of being a daughter, and more.
– * This collection felt so familiar as I read it, which is the magic of reading something your best friend wrote. I see moments from our lives turned into small details, or something you’ve always been obsessed with become a plot point. At the same time, I felt like I was seeing .
