The title of Ankur Thakkar’s debut novel comes from an advertisement for Boost, a fictional new app that’s sort of a mashup of social media present and past. However, much like the novel itself, the phrase operates on multiple levels. It refers to the way one of the dual protagonists, Payal Bajwa, earns fame on this new platform, yet it also refers to how the other protagonist, Arjun Vohra, must blow up the self he has imagined he would one day become. Third, it serves to highlight the acts of international terror that tick away in the background until they explode. The novel is ostensibly a love story amidst a grim dissection of internet culture that follows Arjun and Payal from high school to separate colleges halfway across the country to a precarious adulthood unduly influenced by the pressure and pleasure of life online. It is also a story of success, how we define it, who gets it, what it means specifically for South Asian immigrant families, and the emotional and moral costs exacted in its pursuit. I’ve known Ankur for almost twenty years when we met at an orientation for our MFA program, and since then we’ve shared a lot of work, eaten a lot of oysters, and had a lot of cocktails at AWP hotel bars. While success for Payal and Arjun remains murky, Ankur’s success as a writer is undeniable, and I’m so excited to be able to talk with my friend about his stellar first novel.
Jeremy Wilson
As I mentioned, Blow Yourself Up is primarily a love story, but it’s also a treatise on internet culture. Arjun thinks: “The internet used to be this shiny new thing, but it had crept into every crevice of culture because we let it. To protest meant you were too late. This was how the internet had won.” And yet, the novel feels like a protest. Is this an attempt at fighting back? Or has the internet won?
Ankur Thakkar
I’m glad we’re starting out light and fun. In this novel I wanted to capture how we shaped the internet as it shaped us, shifting our behavior in ways both glaring and subtle. That’s literally the marketing copy. But to drill into Arjun’s perspective, as a musician who cares deeply about the details, he’s reacting to how readily we’ve accepted the degradation of art in the name of modernization. We strain to see bands or paintings between raised smartphones recording footage that disappears into the camera roll, so much of our streaming audio is compressed to shit, and our rich history of professional criticism is being replaced with algorithmic selection, the impacts of which aren’t noticeable if we aren’t paying attention. And when you look at the lexicon underpinning this change, the language of modern software development, terms like master and slave, user, blacklist, feed, even follower, these concepts are drawn from subjugating structures of power. So yes, it’s a war. And what we’re fighting for is our own attention. Every novel is an attempt at fighting back, another bomb thrown in the war on attention.
Jeremy Wilson
I felt anxious reading many of your scenes where characters are scrolling through their phones, which is a testament to your skill at capturing our internet-fueled anxiety. I’m thinking specifically of when Payal is on a date and she can’t stop looking at her phone because her Boost is getting some love. She is occupying multiple places at once, present but not present. In some ways, the novel is asking if this fragmentation of the self (and our attention) is an inevitability or if we might do something about it.
Ankur Thakkar
Thanks for bringing this up, because the representation of other media (texts, notifications, audio, etc) came up early with Megan Stielstra, my brilliant editor. We discussed at length my decision not to separate the notifications Payal sees with italics, or a different typeface or color. I wanted to have the phone notifications render as subtly as possible on the page while still remaining distinct, because I think, in our minds, the experience isn’t actually that fragmented. You’re with a friend at a restaurant, they wonder if they should order some appetizers, another friend texts that they’re omw!, then quickly spell out on my way because they’re embarrassed by the autocorrect, and you tell the first friend maybe you could put in drinks to start. We’re constantly shuffling between modes of communication as we’ve adapted to these devices, for better or worse, and my intention was to render it as faithfully to actual cognition as I could.
Jeremy Wilson
In addition to asking philosophical questions about the self, consciousness, fate, free will, morality, the novel is rich with philosophical references, and Arjun studies philosophy at U of C. Was the intention to counter the immediacy of the internet with references to a type of thought that is deeper and slower and more attentive?
Ankur Thakkar
I love philosophical texts because, at their core, they illustrate the workings of a mind trying to explain what this is, where we are, and how we should be. Of course there is also math and formal logic depending on the author’s level of freak, but their concerns were exactly ours. There’s a comfort in that. Novels from other eras give you this same feeling. We’ve always been thinking about the same things, which means the past isn’t really as past as advertised. The internet also flattens time, but does so in a way that heightens the immediate. It’s only ever just now. Which isn’t exactly wrong, but I wanted to explore the tension within these divergent time signatures.
Jeremy Wilson
The novel has a certain untethered quality with respect to time. You might mention terrorist attacks and wars and apps, but they’re non-specific. This parallels the looping structure of Boost videos and the idea that everything is always looping anyway, one war leads to another war, etc. Why was it important for you to stay away from specific temporal touchstones?
Ankur Thakkar
You’re right. The guiding shape of the novel is a loop, which mirrors the Boost videos, but also complicates the flattening of time we just discussed. It’s a well-worn cliche that history doesn’t repeat so much as rhyme, and because the internet moves culture so rapidly, it was important to stay general about certain things so that readers could enter the story through their unique referential frames. That said, there are some touchstones. We know 9/11 has happened, and later that we’re in the dawn of AI, but in the intervening years I wanted the freedom to invent, to compress and structure the plot to tell the best possible story.
Jeremy Wilson
The novel alternates between Arjun and Payal’s points of view. Did you always conceive of this as a dual narrative, and what challenges and opportunities did that structure present?
Ankur Thakkar
Both Payal and Arjun were in this novel from the very beginning, as well as other perspectives that didn’t make the cut. I wanted to show how differently people can experience the same moments. I think it was especially important for a love story, to follow both characters as they grow together and apart over time. I think this counts as both a challenge and an opportunity, but the fact that they live in different socioeconomic realities as well as in different cities allowed me to explore the themes of the novel more broadly and deeply.
Jeremy Wilson
Characters in Blow Yourself Up are often in transit: cabs, buses, ride shares, planes, trains. What is it about these—and I hate this word because of its overuse in lit circles, but here goes—liminal spaces that make them a recurring setting?
Ankur Thakkar
I wish I could say I was conscious of this. Blow Yourself Up is a cities novel, and trains are how a city connects to itself and where people of different backgrounds interact. And because it’s also a novel about ambition, about going somewhere, it felt natural to keep my characters in motion.
Jeremy Wilson
New York and Chicago feature prominently in the novel, both places you have lived and worked. Tell me about how each city nurtured you as a writer, the similarities and differences between the two writing communities, and your favorite food each city claims as its invention.
Ankur Thakkar
Rebecca Makkai wrote, in her discussion guide to The Great Believers, that “Chicago is, in a way, the great love of my life.” This feels true to me. Chicagoans are obsessed with their city. This includes those of us who had to leave. Chicago is a city that shows up for you. The writers I met there, you included, didn’t care about hierarchy, just whether you had something interesting to say. It took me many years in New York before I found my people, and whenever I meet someone from Chicago we are instantly bonded. As for food, I think both Chicago and New York have a claim on this delicacy’s history in this country, and neither fucks with ketchup. For peace and unity, I’d like to propose my ideal hybrid glizzy: poppy-seed bun, all-beef dog, yellow mustard, giardiniera, and celery salt.
Jeremy Wilson
Payal gains fame in part because she pokes fun at her South Asian heritage and how some people within the community contribute to their own fetishization and exoticism. But at the same time both Payal and Arjun are hyper aware and proud of being part of that heritage. Does this cultural conflict resonate with your own life and writing?
Ankur Thakkar
Absolutely. Way too much ink has been spilled about the experience of growing up othered, less so about the depths of self-othering within communities of color. It’s so fascinating how the South Asian immigrant communities also checked in their cultural baggage on those international flights, and modeled stratification in America as they reinvented themselves. I come from a relative place of privilege because of my complexion and gender and the religion of my parents, even though I was the only brown kid in my school. During cultural events, I was seen as weird by other Indian kids because I listened to Bad Religion and played drums and refused to wear Express track jackets. It wasn’t until my last year of college when I joined a bhangra team and a South Asian acapella group and befriended Sikh and Muslim students, an experience that I heavily drew from for this novel. College is also when I first read novels from the Diaspora™️ which is how my villain origin story began. Many of these mango and curry novels were really about whiteness, about translating an experience to make it palatable, and they instilled the fire in me to figure out what comes after, a project I share with so many talented South Asian novelists publishing right now.
Jeremy Wilson
There’s a joke late in the book where you list all the ways Arjun is trying to help himself fall asleep, and “literary fiction” is included. Your novel blends certain genre elements from romance and Bollywood, so is this whole genre vs. literary thing a tired and largely manufactured divide? How did you deliberately include genre elements and what do you think each side of the divide might learn from the other?
Ankur Thakkar
The divide is so boring, isn’t it? The evil site’s classificatory robots think Blow Yourself Up is historical fiction, for reasons. Look, I think there’s value in helping people discover what they like to read, and to suggest other titles that may deploy similar conventions or elements of craft. But we can’t confuse the existence of a lane with the belief that there aren’t other roads. Some of the most exciting writing right now deliberately blurs genre elements to create new paths altogether, which is the truest expression of what ‘novel’ means. To invoke our beloved Chicago once more, the only thing that matters is having something interesting to say, to tell a great story.
FICTION
Blow Yourself Up
By Ankur Thakkar
TriQuarterly Books
Published September 15, 2026
