Love & its limitations

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While Judy Balan’s debut book Two Fates explored the intricacies of marriage and divorce, her second and latest Sophie Says is her take on new age relationships told through the experiences of Sophie, a representative of 20-something urban generation and a break-up coach with commitment issues.

Sophie is independent, headstrong and an opinionated woman, who thinks she has it all figured out, which makes Sophie Says an entertaining commentary on the 21st century relationships and all the fashionable issues that people seem to come with — commitment, intimacy, boundary and space worries.
Writing for Balan happened entirely by accident. A string of coincidences combined with a desperate need to find out what it was that this English graduate was good at led to her first book. It all started with her first job with a newspaper where she wasn’t writing but selling ad space. Within three months she knew she sucked at her job and left.
She swung from there to advertising. She served as a copywriter for about five and a half years and it was during that time that she realised writing was her greatest gift. But writing sales messages was not making her happy. She went on till the frustration started eating her from the inside.
“I was in the middle of a personal crisis (my divorce and newfound single-parent-without-alimony status) and I stayed on because I needed the money and didn’t think I was equipped to do anything else. I quit advertising because my daughter needed me at home and it was in the following three years of being broke, incredibly clueless and completely out of options that I turned to blogging for personal joy. And strangely, I discovered that the darker life got, the funnier I became. I could suddenly see humour in every situation, even the most painful ones. So most of my blog posts were and still are in the memoir-comedy-pop-philosophy genre,” says this Chennai-based author.
Comedy comes naturally to her. Two Fates and now Sophie Says testify her comfort with the genre. “I think what works for me is the fact that I find it easy to talk about the deep, serious stuff in a light, funny and sometimes irreverent manner,” she quips.
Although she had a lot of fodder on relationships and breakups, Two Fates was just an experiment for she wasn’t sure if she was equipped to write novels, yet she decided to go ahead. “A few years back I came across the parody of Eat Pray Love and found it funny, I happened to be reading Two States then and I thought, ‘Won’t it be so cool if I wrote the parody of this book!’ I blogged about it and everyone thought it was a great idea, so I gave it a shot.”
And what prompted her to give birth to Sophie? She answers, “I spent a whole decade of my life getting in and out of dysfunctional relationships in the hope of finding ‘the one’ till it all blew up in my face. I have always had this compulsive need to analyse every person and situation in my life to shreds, so I did that with every relationship and every break-up. Add to this, all the boy trouble and general drama in my friends’ lives and my orbit. It started to accumulate in my head and I decided to put it down on paper.”
Judy writes full-time now. And when she is not writing, she is dreaming of exploring the world. “I haven’t travelled much but it’s something I really, really want to do. It opens your mind, broadens your perspectives and refreshes you like nothing else,” says this rock fan and sitcom addict.
She adds, “One of my biggest dreams is to someday be part of the writer’s room of a major sitcom and if we’re really going wild, something that has Steve Carell and Mindy Kaling in it.”
Next she wants to write comic fantasy. She is in a comfortable position right now and there is no such pressure of competing with her contemporaries. “I don’t worry about other books and writers. After all, there is no such thing as an original story. Just the individual’s take on it. And of course, there is style. No one can rob your voice. And if they do, they’ll find that they can’t do it for too long. So as long as I’m staying honest and being ‘me’, I don’t think I need to worry about standing out in the clutter,” sums up Balan.