Avni Doshi on ‘First House’ and the art of writing women unravelling

It has been six years since the publication of Burnt Sugar paved the way for Avni Doshi’s arrival on the literary road map as one of the most exacting voices in contemporary fiction. It was a debut so precise in its depiction of familial cruelties that it landed her on the Booker Prize shortlist and left a generation of readers, myself included, breathless. Her sophomore fiction, First House (2026), arrives amidst a similar, albeit dividing frenzy. Many have already dubbed it as the divorce novel of the decade while others have called it a story about self-excoriation.

As Doshi joins me for our chat over Zoom from her sundrenched Dubai apartment, she seems practically unfazed by the sheer extremities of these reactions. In fact, if her gleaming smile is anything to go by, it is something she has more than willingly come to expect. “Even with my first book, I received very polarised reactions. So I am not surprised this is happening again,” she says with a laugh. I share a friend’s personal reaction to the book at this point, one that placed First House as a love child of Kate Chopin and Anita Desai, placed somewhere within the literary lineage of someone like Elena Ferrante. Doshi quickly jots this down in her notebook with a smile before continuing: “I think there are people the book has really resonated with and they really connected with it. On the other hand, there are others who simply did not resonate with the work.”

It all began not with one, not with two, but with three distinctively different visions for Doshi. The first was an idea for a multigenerational family saga—an Indian-American family in the US, haunted by a prophecy. “I had an idea that I wanted to write the story of a family and a curse around dying in the waters.” The second arrived, unbidden, in 2018 when a heavily pregnant Doshi encountered a statue of the goddess Diana; an image that would eventually go on to anchor her novel. “I couldn’t figure out why, because it’s a stunningly beautiful sculpture,” she explains. “There are many stunningly beautiful sculptures that I encounter all the time but there was something about this one that just captured me.” She had no clue about the statue’s history of patriarchy and redemption: just an instinctive, even visceral, sense of being pulled towards a story about a married couple encountering the sculpture together.

The third, and the final strand of creative inspiration, came from an unlikely source: cicadas. In 2024, Doshi found herself reading obsessively about the periodical cicadas; insects she remembered seeing in childhood in New Jersey. She recalls growing up terrified of these insects which would emerge from the ground from time to time and for the longest, while herself contemplating the idea of writing an essay on the same.

But an unassuming, casual walk under a full moon changed the course of all three of these independent projects for Doshi. “As I was walking, everything suddenly braided in my mind and I realised that the character I was writing in all three projects was the same character.” Within seconds, the stature of the Amazon goddess Diana, the prophecy of a familial curse, and the haunting rise and fall of the cicadas, all collapsed into a single idea: a novel about one woman, refracted.

Trained in art history, Doshi began her work on the novel by making a mood board. She quickly shuffles around her study to pull it up for me to see: an exhilarating collage of images of women in monstrous domestic spaces. From Louise Bourgeois to Leonora Carrington, everyone finds their way onto this canvas whose examination of the feminine and the domestic eventually proceeds to a series of grotesque images that attempt to imagine a merging of the two. It is a fascinating visual distillation of an authorial vision and a novel that appears almost deceptively simple.

Set in suburban America, the novel follows the story of an unnamed woman, whose husband announces that he is leaving her one fine day. It is an announcement that shakes the very core of her identity; not because she is in love with her husband, but because being married to him forms the entirety of her existence. Doshi takes this simple premise and turns it into a searing portrait of a woman coming undone. Her prose— precise, clinical, but never verbose—seethes with a rage that is as engaging as it is restrained. “When I’m writing prose, it’s really an act of listening and it’s an act of hearing. I am unable to write until I can hear the voice,” she says. “My characters have a psychic autonomy which allows them to express a kind of rage that is not always accessible to me as an individual. It’s something that I have to feel and hear come alive.”

But the knife-edge quality of Doshi’s prose—a sharpness the reader feels but can’t necessarily always locate—is, by Doshi’s own account, mostly forged in revision. After typing her drafts, she spends hours ruthlessly editing her own work with a red pen; digging away and dismembering sentences until they have achieved an acceptable level of sharpness. This editorial ruthlessness nearly derailed her production schedule this time around. Working across three editors in the UK, the US, and India, Doshi had reached the proof stage (well past the point where major changes are meant to happen) when she decided to abandon her screen-only editing plan and print the manuscript out.

“I was like, nope, we’re making big changes, and I began crossing out entire paragraphs. I made a real mess at the proof stage this time, and it was a lesson to me,” Doshi admits with a sheepish smile. Her process is tactile in ways that resist the convenience of a laptop. Large sections of The First House were handwritten on legal pads before making it to a screen, and for her third novel, she’s contemplating writing the entire draft by hand—a method she used extensively for Burnt Sugar. She has been thinking, she says, of how Mary Oliver used to walk everywhere with a notebook, and wants to experiment with writing outside, in motion. The medium of writing for Doshi, is only as important as the instrument with which it is being written. “I always write with a pen. I have the 0.38 and the 0.5 Muji pens which I love writing with. I use the red one to edit,” she says as she gleefully shows me her stash through our screens.

As someone who left home the moment she turned 18, and has now written a book about a house, I ask Doshi about her relationship to home, and to leaving, and if it has undergone any shifts since she was a teenager. “I think turning 40 made me interested in midlife. That was one thing that was at the heart of writing this book.” The shift, she says, doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside. “It could show up as kind of a tragedy, it could show up as a collapse of some kind. Now I almost never want to travel. I have this very strong desire to put down roots, be in the same place, and have very regular routines.”

This desire to hold ground has also come together with a desire to allow herself to get engulfed by what Doshi describes as the “intimacy of small experiences.” She admits to a gnawing desire within her to keep shrinking her world gradually; become more interested in her neighbours, or maybe her own garden. Or perhaps a five minute walk by the beach on an afternoon. “That kind of smallness of experience,” the writer says with her trademark luminescent smile, “has become much more interesting to me.”

Images: Courtesy Harper Collins India and Amazon India

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's October 2026 print issue.

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