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London Writers' Salon
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#202: Tara Menon — Writing a Debut Novel Over Eight Years, Moving From Critic to Novelist, and Surviving Self-Doubt as a Writer

1 tim 3 min•12 juli 2026

Debut novelist Tara Menon on writing friendship as a life-shaping bond, the emotional architecture of grief, and researching the natural world for her novel Under Water.

You’ll learn

  • Why a platonic friendship can shape a life as profoundly as any romance
  • How to build tension in a story when the reader already knows what’s coming.
  • What an unexpected sea creature reveals about writing the bonds between women.
  • The difference between endless research and knowing just enough to write the scene.
  • Why fiction demands a kind of surrender that criticism never asks for.
  • How grief for a lost friend and grief for a vanishing natural world can become one story.
  • When self-doubt is evidence you’re taking the work seriously.
  • Why cutting a novel down to its essentials can matter more than what you leave in.
  • A writing rhythm that looks nothing like “500 words every morning” (and works anyway).
  • What finally makes the writing worth it, long before publication does.

Resources & Links

About Tara Menon

Tara Menon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Nation, Paris Review and Public Books, where she co-edits the Literary Fiction section. Tara was born in India, grew up in Singapore, spent a decade in New York, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her debut, Under Water, is out now.

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