With The Passenger Seat and Elegy, Southwest coming out within weeks of each other, minor lits decided to capitalize on the coincidence and get novelist couple Vijay Khurana and Madeleine Watts together for a conversation about their respective works. Over a Zoom call at the end of February, the chat ranged from the novels’ origins, how each influenced the others’ development, and the similarities they noticed now returning to the books on the eve of publication, to broader social, political topics and more intimate concerns. The following is adapted from that conversation.

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minor lits: Kind of a cheesy question, but how did you two meet?

Madeleine Watts: I think it’s a good question to start off with, but I think Vijay should answer it before I do.

Vijay Khurana: I usually say we met on Twitter … I’d become quite smitten with essays of Madeleine’s I would see online. We followed each other, and had some interactions. And then we ended up meeting in person in New York a couple of months before the pandemic really kicked in.

I went to New York a couple of times, Madeleine came to Berlin a couple of times. And then we were thrown together by the pandemic. We ended up living in Australia, and not just living together but living in quarantine for two weeks in a house with only each other to talk to. So it was very much a baptism of fire, which I think we came through quite well.

ml: Are you content with that retelling, Madeleine, or do you have anything to add?

MW: Yeah, that’s about right. Probably at the time the relationship seemed a bit impossible because Vijay was in Europe, and I was in New York. But then, suddenly everything was accelerated and concentrated. It wasn’t just one period of quarantine. There were a couple of periods of quarantine in various houses. That’s either going to make or break you.

But also, how we originally got to know one another, especially because we were communicating across oceans, was text based; it came from reading one another’s work. Giving Vijay my first novel in proof form felt like a big courtship ritual, and he gave me the short stories he was working on to read. Part of falling in love, and the foundation of the relationship, was the fact that we were both writers, and both really liked one another’s writing. That was woven into the fabric of the relationship.

VK: It’s unfashionable to talk about the pandemic, but I do think it gave a certain kind of rhythm to our relationship. Neither of us were living in places where we felt at home, but we were also in a very familiar country. There was just this rhythm to waking up in the morning and reading and writing, and being quiet and going for a walk, and it’s a rhythm we’ve actually carried forward where quiet, meditative time is part of what we like to do together.

MW: The first time Vijay told me about his idea for The Passenger Seat was in just that sort of moment. We were in Berlin at that point and everything was locked down. It was a period where you could really only go for a long walk, and we were sitting by the Landwehr Canal; he told me that he had an idea for a short novella that he would write in between finishing some short stories and going back to the novel he had been working on when we met. Five years later it’s now very much not a novella, and is coming out.

VK: I can’t decide whether to respond regarding my novel or talk about the fact that we’re now narrativizing our own relationship, and I feel like that’s a big part of what your novel is about, telling the story of a relationship from one side.

MW: That’s one of the things they say about a breakup, right? A relationship is telling the same story, and the breakup starts to happen when you start telling different or divergent stories about the same thing.

Who gets to tell the story then? What kind of story is the correct one to tell? What do you leave in? What do you leave out? To create any kind of narrative is also to some extent to lie. I don’t think there’s any way around that. And so including an awareness of the trickery of telling any kind of story is pertinent to both this conversation and that novel.

VK: When I was rereading Elegy, Southwest I was really struck by this moment towards the end where Eloise is looking back at videos Lewis has made and trying to find meaning in them, trying and failing to find something that she hasn’t got; she’s missing some piece of a puzzle of the other person. It really echoed with a point towards the end of the first section in The Passenger Seat, where Adam is performing on camera but deliberately sort of performing nonsense. He’s fantasizing about the people who will come along afterwards and try to find meaning in the violent things he’s done and what he’s saying and doing on camera, and the very fact of denying them that understanding is the point for him. In my novel, I think that itself is an act of violence: the idea of denying someone a cohesive narrative.

MW: I noticed that, actually, as a similarity. I think when we were writing the books, the narrative we had between one another was that these books are incredibly different. There is no similarity at all between them. It didn’t occur to us until less than twelve months ago that we’d both written road trip novels. It didn’t occur to us that there were any kind of similarities at all, because they felt so different, and they were coming from different places. And so it was interesting to be rereading your book over the last week, because I picked up on the videos. There are these moments in The Passenger Seat, where you’re usually in such close 3rd person, and then there’ll be this breach. That 3rd person will zoom out as though it’s a camera, and it will talk about things that have been recorded later on, things like stories that are being told in the newspaper; the mediation of the narrative comes through in those moments. I hadn’t noticed that as something we were both doing or thinking about.

ml: How much of each other’s works were you reading as they were being written?

VK: We would read drafts of each other’s novels relatively often. And we’ve certainly had conversations specific to the narratological or creative problems we were having with each book. I remember being in New York City with Madeleine, on the Lower East Side where we lived for a while, sitting on one of those quite grim benches in what is technically a park but feels like a concrete strip between two lanes of traffic, really fleshing out how my book was going to climax, and the way the two narratives and two relationships would fit together. We had those type of conversations relatively often, right?

MW: Yeah. I would often talk about things I was worried about. When I first started writing Elegy, Southwest it felt a bit more like an exercise. I’d published my first book, and for various reasons, was feeling really frustrated with a particular model of storytelling that some might call ‘conventional.’ There were things that I wanted to talk about, but I was finding that the tools, the examples available to me, felt useless. And so I was interested in trying to write a different kind of narrative that was pushing against the idea of plot. I was obsessively rereading Sebald, for instance, and things like Wittgenstein’s Mistress or Cleanness or The Friend, and those were the sort of things I was reaching for. The final product actually does have much more plot, but in the beginning I often didn’t know where it was going. I just had various things I wanted to be addressed in every chapter.

At some point early on, we went for a long walk in Karow, north of Berlin. There was a sign on the gate saying, “Beware of the wild cows!” We were in that field, and I was vaguely aware of the wild cows while I was trying to figure out what would happen at the end of this novel, talking it through with Vijay. The big question I had was how to justify the second person address, because the book is addressed by Eloise to Lewis, an absent ‘you.’ I needed it to be integral if I was going to keep it, and figure out the reason for it being so told. I specifically remember figuring out how the book would end on that long walk. So we were constantly reading one another’s work and thinking about it. And oddly, the books are coming out at the same time.

VK: It’s so interesting that we’re talking about narrative and the destination of a novel or the structuring of a novel, and where it might end up, when we’re also talking about road trips. I feel like there’s such an interesting mirroring. I was also writing against the idea of a conventional or predetermined ‘destination’ in terms of plot. That’s why the second section of The Passenger Seat goes somewhere completely different, into the life of a minor character who was only briefly alluded to in the first section.

Then there’s the idea that so much of being on a road trip is a present-tense act of narrativizing. And that is something I was definitely writing about: the idea that the two young male characters are constantly imagining what they’re doing as a story that somebody is going to tell afterwards, whether it’s them or it’s someone else. There’s a link there to the way young men perform their masculinity and see themselves as if from the outside.

I think there’s something similar happening in Elegy, Southwest as well, in terms of: we’ve got to make memories. In summer, I always say, ‘We have to go to the lake. We’ve got to go swimming, because in winter it’ll be freezing, and we’ll have nothing but the memory of a lovely day at the lake.’ I think your main two characters, who are a couple, are in the act of making that kind of story.

MW: That quality of memory-making is very big in Elegy, Southwest. It’s retrospectively told, addressing somebody who’s no longer there, so every memory is freighted with meaning, because it’s imbued with loss. It’s a little like being in the winter and only having memories to live off.

On the other hand, one of the things you capture so well about these two particular boys in The Passenger Seat, is that they’re narrativizing their own lives. They’re moving into subjectivity. But because they’re so young, half-formed in a way, they have these ideas of themselves that they can only inhabit for a moment. There’s a moment when Teddy and Adam have had an altercation with a couple by the roadside, and many pages later, Adam suddenly thinks about what it would be like if the girl had been his girlfriend. He thinks himself into a moment where it was his girlfriend, and he turns on Teddy and looks at him hatefully. That ability to capture a constantly moving and unstable sense of selfhood, is one of the central elements of your writing, I think. The road trip narrative is so different when the people who are driving are teenagers, when they’re so open, and they could be anything; whereas I think the way I was writing, the people are much less elastic, they’re set. They’re in their late twenties, and because it’s told with this very heavy sense of retrospection, they’re locked in place, and it can’t be anything other than what it was. There is a completely different sense of subjectivity.

VK: That idea of playing with identity and playing being not necessarily something you’re in control of is interesting to me. It’s something I wanted to write about in terms of young men having the possibilities of selfhood before them, but also having a very unstable selfhood, as you said. I think—I hope—that all young men think about some of these things as they go through life at ages 17, 18, 19. That they think about how they relate to the people around them. That as a young, straight man, at some point, whether explicitly, consciously, or not, you start to think about how your sexuality affects not just the way you behave sexually, but the way you behave socially: the way you behave towards others, including male friends. In some ways you could say the genesis for this book goes back a long way, to when I would be going on road trips with friends. When I was quite young and trying to find my way into some kind of identity or selfhood.

But I think what’s key in The Passenger Seat is that it’s a mediated selfhood. It’s about young men experiencing the world as mediated by male privilege. And that’s echoed in the idea of the road trip, because the road trip is so mediated. You’re experiencing the world through the windscreen and you’re not actually in the world; you’re moving through it. That happens a lot in Elegy, Southwest as well. There are people driving through a national park but not getting out of their cars, or the actress who wants palm trees planted so she doesn’t have to get out of her car and things like that. Be it with ideas of masculinity, or even of climate, I think that it’s important to remember that a whole lot of experiences are mediated through the superstructures of society and government, which become basically, essentially, the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves.

MW: Also the way the car, particularly when there are just two people in it, is hermetic. You have walls on either side of you, you can control the climate; it’s its own world.

We don’t own a car, and I can’t drive, but for the length of our relationship, whenever we’ve gone on a long road trip, we’ve tried to listen to an audiobook of Middlemarch, and we’ve been—

VK: Stuck like a third, half of the way through Middlemarch. We need to go on another road trip …

MW:  We’ve done this in three or four different countries, where we’ve been moving through a landscape talking about Middlemarch trying to remember what happened, and who the secondary characters are, because there’s usually been months or years in-between listening to it. We continue to live in this mediated Middlemarch, that has nothing to do with Australia, or upstate New York or Germany or the UK … It perfectly encapsulates that hermetic mediated reality.

VK: The road trip is both: the limitless expanses of the “open road” but also a really claustrophobic, domestic, intimate space. I think both our novels reflect that, and interrogate that juxtaposition or paradox about what it’s like being on the road with somebody.

ml: Thinking of the stability of subjecthood, in your novel, Madeleine, it’s set against the instability of the natural world and what’s going on with the question of water, which is the topic Eloise is working on. Is there anything you’d like to say about context of instability in the American Southwest?

MW: So some of this comes back to questions of narrative, right? One of the things I was always really interested in, particularly coming from an Australian background, is the fact that the environmental narrative you encounter, the one you grow up with, is one produced by Europe.

One of the things that drew me to the American southwest was that I felt really at home there, in an incredibly uncanny way, and a lot of that had to do with it being very similar to Australia. L.A. in particular, and Southern California, is very, very similar to Sydney where we grew up, in the way it looks, and the plants that grow there, the particular weather systems. Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear is the best book about this. Those weather systems are Biblical; they are catastrophic. Not a lot will happen, and then suddenly, there’ll be a catastrophic wildfire, a catastrophic landslide, catastrophic floods.

Both landscapes work in the same kind of weather cycles; there are fires, and floods, and there’s a preoccupation with water. And so the kind of narratives about nature produced in Europe and the East Coast don’t apply in these particular places, but people will talk as though they do. The idea of a natural balance produced by those narratives fundamentally skews your ability to see the reality of the place you’re in.

They’re also places that were colonized. You have these narratives about nature which are produced elsewhere, coupled with an historical disregard for indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

These narratives are always tied to ideas that we can control things, that we can figure out any problem that comes our way, but those ideas simply don’t hold like they used to. They fall apart. What’s happening with climate change accelerates the falling apart of those narratives because it’s catastrophe upon catastrophe, upon catastrophe.

I’m a big believer in place effecting and creating character and a sense of self, and the instability of place is, I think, tied to a growing sense of instability in our lives, and what we can expect from the course of our lives. In some ways, that might be tied to a millennial experience of having grown up in the relatively safe nineties and two-thousands, of being told to expect that the big, bad things would be figured out, like we’d figured out the Cold War. Everything will be fine. To have all those narratives collapse and burn around you as soon as you reach adulthood creates a fundamental sense of shock, you’re out of control.

It’s an imperfect metaphor, the instability of the landscape, but also humans always reach for metaphors. The problem arises when the metaphor completely occludes our ability to actually see where we are and what the reality of the situation is.

VK: I think you have a very personal interest in things like water, and the way people impose themselves on the environment, and the damage that can cause. You’re very interested in desire for control as a kind of violence, I feel. It almost felt like while writing a novel, you were also giving yourself a direction for reading and for thinking, and giving yourself a way to respond to and adequately think through all of the ideas you were coming across.

It was so satisfying to get to the end of your novel and see the extensive notes and references. When a character picks up a particular book at a bookstore, all we hear is the author’s name, maybe not even that. But at the end of the novel, that particular book that was referenced for a fraction of a second is listed, and you even list the edition.

MW: I started being interested in the Southwest, and water in the Southwest in particular, in 2015, well before we met. It never occurred to me that I was researching, I was just reading stuff that I was interested in. I already had a tendency to be a magpie kind of reader, always reading seven things at once. When I started writing the novel, I’d already done the research without knowing it, just from years of following my interests in what I was reading. Then there would be other things I realized I had read, that had putatively nothing to do with the physical location I was writing about, but had something to do with what I was thinking about, whether that was the death drive or Georgia O’Keefe or Elizabeth Bishop. And I realized that these things also had something to do with one another.

VK: It’s like a constellation or a nexus of interconnections. All of these things are in a firmament above you: land art, a particular poet, moments of history, moments of environmental history, moments that approach scientific, environmental writing … they’re all linked together.

Rereading, it was almost like looking up at the night sky, and a couple of stars might seem different, a little bit brighter than they had last time you looked up. Or maybe you didn’t notice them before, but because they’re a little bit brighter, they almost seem to belong in a constellation together.

I just think that’s a really lovely part of the book, having a sense within yourself when you’re reading of what links together, and how it connects.

MW: There’s this really beautiful resonance in The Passenger Seat too, which feels like a kind of balance. As I reread, purely for pleasure, the editorial part of my brain switched off, I could see how it all knitted together. It was balanced on exactly the same note at the beginning and end of the book, where you come back to thinking about the boys jumping off the bridge into water that looks too shallow. It reminded me of all of the times in the past five years when we’ve been at a body of water, and you’ve pointed out young boys diving off something high into water, being concerned. You’ve been watching out for them. So there was a weird sense in which the reading experience reminded me of conversations we’ve had and how I now notice, from reading the book, that you were noticing things and they were showing up in your work. But there was also a wonderful, continuous experience wherein I could finally experience the book in its entirety.

VK: And it ends with water too. It ends with this man in his fifties going kayaking because he is comforted by giving his body work to do, and he feels as though his transgressions can be atoned for through the sheer exercise of his shoulder muscles paddling through the water. For me, it’s about how men see their way through the world, how they create their own narratives and cast themselves as the victims, in a way, of their own actions, oftentimes gamifying their way through life.

An important moment in the writing of the book was when I realized what that second section would look like. It’s also encouraging the reader to compare these two very different friendships, and these very different characters. I’m interested in the difference between men whom we tend to think of as utterly monstrous and from whom we could never hope to learn anything because they are so monstrous, and men we tend to think of as ultimately good, even if they’re flawed. Putting the two side by side was key.

MW: Well, another question that has been asked of us: both of us were born in Sydney, and we’ve written books, neither of which are set in the place that we’re from. Should we talk about why we did that?

VK: The Passenger Seat isn’t set in a named place, but it is essentially a kind of Northwestern North America. I was interested in writing a semi-imagined, semi-mythologized place, and I did read a lot, and I did look at images and things like that. But I’m not trying to convince anyone that I’m writing a particular place.

I think I always felt so completely free writing about that kind of landscape. I was so free of memory. At times, early on, I thought: “Well, if these two young men are going on this road trip, then why don’t they do it somewhere in Australia where I’ve been?” But that felt very stifling, like doors were closing rather than opening. What about you?

MW: Our approaches to writing about place are so different. I was very familiar with the Southwest, even though I always lived in New York. But I’d been there a lot, and had done these trips where I had taken copious notes, thinking one day I would use them for something. I didn’t know if it would be fiction or nonfiction, I was just trying to be attentive. And so I had all of this specificity about particular places, down to signage and the weird names of towns.

So when I was writing, I wanted to be very specific about those places, the more specific I could get, the better. I don’t think of it in terms of imaginative freedom or not. It was almost as though the constraint of those places, the specifics of place in Arizona or Nevada, benefited the writing. It’s a work of fiction, so theoretically I could make it anything I wanted it to be. But the constraint of the real geography and timeline felt quite important.

VK: I love the title, but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually asked you how you chose it. The way the comma is placed, it’s not an elegy to the southwest. It’s sort of an elegy of the southwest, or an elegy to, as in towards the southwest.

I think it’s really resonant. Such a small thing as a comma placement: Elegy comma Southwest. It also sounds like one of those crazy American town names, as though Southwest were a State rather than a region, as though Elegy is a town that Eloise and Lewis pass through on their ultimately diverging journeys.

MW: Yeah, it was very much playing on American place naming conventions which have always driven me a bit mad. Because you always have to qualify Paris, with ‘Paris, France.’ There’s a Melbourne, Florida, and I would sometimes, in America, have to specify ‘Melbourne, Australia,’ rather than ‘Melbourne, Florida’ … Why would it be the one in Florida that I’d be talking about? It Americanizes the whole world, that kind of place naming convention.

ml: So, what’s coming up next? Where’s your next destination?

VK: I’m doing a Ph.D., which is practice-led, so I’m writing a novel about sound technology and the disembodied voice and listening. It’s quite autobiographical. It’s about a second-generation immigrant kid growing up mostly apart from his extended family, so for example knowing his grandmother’s voice much better than the way she looks or smells, then becoming very obsessed with radio and ending up as a radio presenter, as I did in my twenties.

MW: I’ve got 4 or 5 things that I’ve started, fiction and non-fiction both, and I’m not sure which will be the one that gets followed through to completion. I’m very much in a not writing, but promoting a book phase.

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The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana is published by Biblioasis in the USA and Ultimo Press in Australia, and will be published by Peninsula Press in the UK. You can order a copy here.

Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts is published in the USA by Simon & Schuster, in Australia by Ultimo Press, and in the UK by Pushkin ONE. You can order a copy here.

Vijay Khurana is a writer and translator from German. His debut novel, The Passenger Seat, was shortlisted for the Novel Prize. His short fiction has appeared in The Guardian, 3:AM Magazine and NOON, among others.

Madeleine Watts is the author of Elegy, Southwest (2025) and The Inland Sea (2021), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published most recently in the Paris Review, Literary Hub, Harper’s, and Orion. Raised in Sydney, and after over a decade in New York, she now lives in Berlin.