Every parent who has lived far from their child, even briefly, knows a particular kind of letter: the one composed entirely in the head, at two in the morning, and never actually written down.
What Meera Never Sent grew out of noticing how much of my own life as a father has happened at a distance — some of it geographic, some of it just the ordinary distance of being a person your child hasn't fully met yet. I started paying attention to the things I wanted to say and didn't, not because they were secret, but because there was never quite the right moment, or the right form. A phone call is not built for certain kinds of honesty. Neither, it turns out, is most conversation.
The novel's structure — letters that exist but never arrive — came from that observation. Not withholding as cruelty, but withholding as a kind of survival, a way of protecting both the writer and the reader from a truth that's easier to carry silently than to hand over. Every parent does some version of this. I wanted to write a book that took that quiet, universal thing seriously instead of treating it as a plot twist.
It's the most personal thing I've written, and probably the one I was most reluctant to finish. There's a particular vulnerability in writing fiction that is, in the end, still a kind of letter itself — one I am, this time, choosing to send.