Books: Marriage of a Thousand Lies and Lot: Stories

By Zach Shattuck

Marriage of a Thousand Lies
SJ Sindu

There is a saying in Tamil that a thousand lies can make a marriage. Lucky’s entire life is based on lies.
She lies that she is comfortable presenting in a feminine way to the world.
She lies that she is in love with her husband, and that both she and her husband are not gay as their parents once feared.
She lies that she maintains her steady job, though she has been making ends meet on commissioned drawings for months.
She lies that she is not in love with her best friend Nisha who, as she steps closer to her own marriage, pushes and pulls Lucky like an indecisive tide between begging to be rescued from her fiance and plunging herself deeper into the engagement.

The greatest lie of all is the one that Lucky is content with the life she has found herself in.

“If I were someone else, in some other story, I’d take a midnight walk with my wife.”

Taking place in the greater Boston area around the 2012 election (though published in 2017), SJ Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies is told from the eyes of Lucky as she navigates the Sri Lankan Tamil community she has grown up in and the increasing pull to a life of freedom and acceptance which she knows she cannot find the way she is living now. She lives with her husband Kris. On their own they traipse to the local gay bars and try to find flings for the other, but within their Tamil community they are a typical husband and wife, only out of the ordinary because they publicly declared a love marriage instead of waiting for an arranged one.

As Lucky continues to try to embrace her semi-closeted life, her childhood friend Nisha reaches out after years of silence. In Nisha’s fickle pleas to run away and start a new life together, Lucky begins to look around and realize how much she cannot stand the lies which have built her life. The novel explores the past which brought Lucky to decide to marry Kris, the past which has left her older sister missing from family get-togethers, and the generational impact of leaving one’s homeland to survive.

I always appreciate books which broaden my understanding and perspective of the world. I had never been taught about the Sri Lankan Civil War in school, and had yet to even enter high school when it ended. Here, Sindu introduces this grim chapter of history through the eyes of survivors – the generation before Lucky. I’d never learned much about Tamil culture, such as the incredible, ancient art that is Bharatanatyam, and reading an author as good as Sindu provided a welcome glimpse into a world I’d never known. 

This novel has a bittersweet ending, and it’s one I genuinely appreciate. We deserve our happy endings, our love, our dreams, our self-respect. I encourage you to pick up this book and see what Lucky chooses.

There are copies of Marriage of a Thousand Lies available at San Diego Public Libraries. 

Lot: Stories
Bryan Washington

When I go to a city, I have little interest in the tourist destinations. I want to feel and hear the real beat of a place. I want to know how its roads wind, crack and rise, I want to know the bumps in the public transit, the facial expressions of the people walking around the lesser-known areas in a city.

With that as my groundwork for going to a city, Bryan Washington’s Lot: Stories has left me with a satisfying picture of Houston. This book is a series of flashes into a young man’s life as he bounces around the many areas of Texas’s largest city. 

This is a raw and visceral book about a boy, and then a man, who grows from cautious to callous as he navigates trying to survive his home. Like life, this book is full of poignant moments, loss, insight, and tenderness.

“You know someone as well as you can. And then they say something that surprises you. It catches you off guard.”

Like life, this book does not have a “happily ever after” but its ending is sweet. The ending is as a chapter in life: not the finale, but the first glimpse into the next events. It’s touching and, given the heartache you experience throughout the book, quite a relief.

Lot is available at multiple San Diego Library locations.