‘How Do We Comprehend Loss at Scale?’: Tara Menon Talks Debut Novel ‘Under Water’ at Harvard English Event

On April 14, assistant professor of English Tara K. Menon discussed her debut novel, “Under Water,” with fellow English professor Teju Cole at an event organized by the Harvard Department of English.

Released on March 17, “Under Water” follows Marissa, a travel writer working in New York City, as she grapples with loss, love, and destruction — both personal and climatic. The novel alternates between two timelines: Marissa’s idyllic childhood exploring the pristine beaches of Phuket, Thailand with her friend Arielle, before the devastating 2004 tsunami strikes the country, and her life in New York eight years later. As another natural disaster — Hurricane Sandy — looms, Marissa reflects on her past.

“One of the major questions is, ‘How do we comprehend loss at scale, both at a human level — so what does it mean that we think about the tsunami and Sandy sometimes in comparable terms — and these are two catastrophic events, and in Sandy 137 people died and in the tsunami 250,000?’” Menon said.

For Cole, Menon’s narrative technique conveyed the struggle of grieving unfathomable loss.

“In one part of the novel, you itemize the permissible beliefs. I thought that was such a powerful part of the story you’re telling me, because there are certain losses that are immediately legible, and in this book, you take on the loss that is not as legible,” Cole said.

Menon shared some of the difficult questions she grappled with when writing the book.

“What is the most appropriate affective response to the fact that we are losing species everyday? How do we deal with that?” Menon said. “Another would be, ‘What does it mean to represent that which we are losing — whether that is an individual, a group of people, or an environment — as not purely being good?’”

At certain points in the book, Menon intentionally sought to portray nature as “sometimes intrinsically and inherently violent and destructive.”

“But does that change the way we think about what it means to lose it? I hope not.” Menon said.

For Menon, the novel form was especially well-suited to contemplate questions of this weight.

“I would like to think, on my best day, that what the novel does is let its readers think through those issues,” Menon said.

Menon is not searching for “clear cut” answers, however.

“I also only want to write about something where I feel like I really don’t know the answer, and the only way that I’m going to know the answer is if I sit, and read everything and write towards it, and in the process of writing, figure it out,” Menon said.

For Menon — who received a bachelor of arts degree in English from Columbia University in 2011, and Ph.D. in English from New York University in 2019 before earning a professorship at Harvard University in 2021 — her academic career informed her writing of the novel.

“I spent seven years writing a Ph.D. about 19th century novels, and that’s also inescapably in there,” Menon said.

The novel’s allusions — from George Eliot’s 1860 novel “The Mill on the Floss,” to Tennyson’s 1850 poem, “In Memoriam,” and its attention to quotidian details or the “realism of the ordinary and the normal — are all examples of the influence of 19th century novels on Menon’s own.

“In Memoriam” is a particularly important paratext to “Under Water.” The friendship between Marissa and Arielle — as well as the novel’s tragedy — is in part inspired by the famous elegy, itself an extended meditation on the death of the narrator’s closest friend since youth.

“One way of reading this book is that it’s a response to ‘In Memoriam,’” Menon said.

Yet Menon’s book centers on a female friendship, rather than a male one — a paradigm in which Menon has long been interested and on which she almost wrote her PhD.

More than eight years in the making, “Under Water” is Menon’s first work of published fiction.

“I can tell you right now — the fact that this is the thing that gets to be the first thing that people read of what I wrote, I’m so grateful for that,” Menon said.

Riya Sikant ’28, an audience member, who took Humanities 10 with Menon in the fall of 2024, remembered attending Menon’s Visitas Lecture on direct speech in the 19th century novel.

“Her talk was so inspiring, and it was one of the reasons why I decided to come to Harvard because I really wanted to learn from professors like her,” Riya said.

At the talk, Sikant saw Menon in another capacity — as a fiction writer.

“It’s been cool to hear again about her journey of writing the book. I’ve learned so much about her as a professor, but now to learn about her as a novelist was really cool,” Riya said.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at [email protected].