AS LATE-FALL AFTERNOON light floods the high-ceilinged living room of Jhumpa Lahiri’s brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the author exudes an outward stillness that in other circumstances might be read as composure. Today, however, her large liquid eyes brim with the unease of her situation: Though she is conducting this interview at home (which, today, is filled with flowers), she finds herself in a country where, over the past few years, she has come to understand that she no longer feels like her true self. That personal realization—and the emotionally risky literary journey that led to it—is the subject of her new book.

In almost every way imaginable, In Other Words is a departure for Lahiri. For one thing, it’s a memoir. Lahiri has been famous as a fiction writer since she won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories that captivated critics and the reading public alike and was translated into more than 35 languages. Since then, she has published two novels (The Namesake and, most recently, The Lowland) and a second collection of longer stories, Unaccustomed Earth. All have dealt with themes of nationality, tradition, family, exile and belonging. Though she has published personal essays, she’s never probed her own creativity and emotional processes in such depth or with such bracing candor. Lahiri describes In Other Words as the “linguistic autobiography” of a writer seeking a new voice, but it is also a kind of travel book that charts a personal pilgrimage between Italy and America (once again her primary residence, as she recently started teaching at Princeton University).

What truly marks this book as a departure for Lahiri is that she wrote it not in English (which isn’t her mother tongue; Bengali was spoken exclusively at home for the first four years of her life) but in Italian, a language she decided to teach herself as an adult. Such was her obsession with Italian that she moved her family (her husband, Alberto, and her two children, Octavio and Noor) to Rome for three years and essentially gave up reading or writing English. Open In Other Words anywhere and you will find Italian on one page and its English counterpart (rendered here by Ann Goldstein, whose other translations include the Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante) on the opposite. It is a dichotomy that turns out, in the course of this brave meditation, to be a love story and a mystery all in one. In that story lies the beginning of all the books that the author has not yet written. As Lahiri describes it, “In learning Italian I learned, again, to write.”

John Burnham Schwartz: You’ve been writing in Italian for three-plus years, and you say you don’t know when you’ll write in English again. You talk about Italian offering you a sense of detachment, a mask, a filter, and yet at the same time, almost counterintuitively, self-expression.

Jhumpa Lahiri: I feel that it’s important to continue and to see where this is taking me. There is a kind of invisibility-cloak feeling with writing in Italian, because it never feels real. Yes, I’ve been writing in Italian now for three years. I’ve written not just this book, but other things—diaries, short stories, things that are piling up with time. But it all feels like a dream; there is a kind of surreal element to it. I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there’s Italian, this strange, other component of me that I’ve just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.

JBS: Sort of like in the beginning, when you wrote fiction and no one was paying any attention?

JL: Yes, that’s exactly what it is. The other day, I pulled down off my shelf all the little journals I published in 20 years ago, like AGNI or New Letters or StoryQuarterly. I felt like they’re sacred. With all due respect, no shelf full of The Lowland will ever give me that emotion. Because those were the things that felt like miracles. You wanted to publish that? I wasn’t paid, three people read them, I made like five photocopies and gave one to my parents and one to my friend and one to my writing teacher, and that was it! Nobody knew who I was and nobody cared and nobody commented on it, and it wasn’t reviewed. This whole experience—going to Italy, living in Rome, learning a new language—I’m keenly aware of some fundamental desire to go back to some kind of beginning place. As I continue to write in Italian, I’m back to photocopying stuff. And I’ll give it to an Italian friend of mine here, saying, “Hey, I wrote this diary thing if you want to read it in your free time, no pressure.” Whereas I know if I had published that text, in English, in The New Yorker, it would be a different thing, right? It would be a different experience.

JBS: How is it knowing that this linguistic place that has made you so happy, as both a person and a writer, isn’t technically yours?

JL: Well, that’s the tension point, the nucleus. That’s the thing that’s both agonizing and irresistible, the forbidden fruit element of it. I’m not supposed to be doing this. I’m supposed to be writing another novel in English about Indian Americans. I haven’t done that. I may never do that again. I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-awareness but also from letting go of many things. Many things that weigh us down.

HER BACK PAGES | ‘In Other Words’ is Lahiri’s first nonfiction book. Previous titles include the novels ‘The Namesake’ (2003) and ‘The Lowland’ (2013) and two collections of stories, ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ (2008) and ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ (1999), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Photo: F. Martin Ramin (5)

JBS: In the book, there’s a sense of your having reached either an impasse or a jumping-off point. As if you felt that continuing the way you were as a writer was almost an impossibility. How long ago did that feeling begin to develop?

JL: I felt instinctively on some not clearly articulated level while I was finishing The Lowland that something was coming to an end. It’s probably because The Lowland was in fact one of my earliest projects, that I was trying to write in some repeatedly failed fashion, from a fairly early point in my life as a writer.

JBS: When was that?

JL: I went to Provincetown [Massachusetts, to the Fine Arts Work Center, where she received a writing fellowship] when I was 30. That was a decisive moment for me. I’d studied creative writing at Boston University in my mid-20s, but I was still in this state of ambivalence and getting my Ph.D. and really not knowing if the writing was meant to go anywhere. There was so much confusion. I was terrified, and I felt I was under a lot of pressure to do other things.

JBS: From your parents?

JL: Yes. My father had always dreamed of getting a Ph.D., but certain life circumstances prevented him from following through. It was a tremendous, deep regret. The day I got my Ph.D., I saw in my father’s face what it meant that I had done this.

JBS: And then you began to write, and that was for yourself.

JL: I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing. And it’s funny, with the Italian book I saw the whole thing repeating itself. I saw the whole pattern of secret writing, nobody knowing, being embarrassed about it, not wanting to talk about it, thinking it was a ridiculous thing to be doing.

JBS: And then you won the Pulitzer for your first book. That is a lot to—

JL: Swallow.

JBS: If you ever really swallow it. And then your first four books—

JL: Well, they’re of a piece. The Lowland was the first book I had conceived, and I couldn’t make it work, and I’d already written some of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies, so that ended up being my first book. The Namesake followed—though even in The Namesake, which is a very different kind of book, I was aware of The Lowland. I was just circling around and around something I was trying to get to. But I do feel like with time I am coming closer to something with the break that’s come now. My sense with English is that I only started to scratch the surface of what I might have to say. And however long this Italian period is going to last—whether it’s a couple of years or a decade, or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and say, I’m done—the reason I’m still in it is because I’m seeing things in a very different way. With a sort of directness that I was always a little afraid of, and self-censoring of, in English.

Jhumpa Lahiri Photo: Dan Martensen for WSJ. Magazine

JBS: Was that self-censoring about your family and your relationships, where you came from? Or was it about pressures that you began to feel as each one of your books came out?

JL: There was a sort of familial expectation, once I became a writer, that I would write a certain kind of book about a certain kind of world. And I think that’s what I did. I started looking at my parents and looking at their journey and their experiences and their hardships and what they suffered and how they saw things and what they were experiencing. And I kind of went into them. In Other Words is the first book I’ve written in which I have stepped away from a sense of responsibility to them. I’m not saying I’ve said the last words on what that experience is, and after all it isn’t even my experience. But in this book I feel like I shut the door on everything. I wrote it for myself. I am looking at myself and who I am. And of course the book started as my diary. So it had a very private, personal origin.

JBS: You talk in the new book about two diaries. You have one that you started in Italian about learning Italian. And from the back page of the same notebook you began a different kind of Italian diary, more personal and exploratory. And I’m wondering how you feel those two diaries connect, now that you’ve written the book.

JL: Well, now I’ve written a lot of other things. Since writing this book.

JBS: What things?

JL: I wrote a [new] diary [in Italian, for the literary journal Nuovi Argomenti]. It talks about the last month we spent in Rome this summer, a very difficult period of my life. And writing it was a really magical experience. It was a very intense month, and I felt—I knew I was leaving Italy, I was so distraught, I was so heartbroken. I mean really suffering in a way that I’ve never felt before.

JBS: Like grief?

JL: I felt like a part of me was dying, that our life was dying, that what we had built was dying. No part of me wanted it to end. And yet we’d made this decision to come back to the United States.

JBS: But the time in Italy felt ephemeral to you?

JL: It felt—you know, I’m a person, and this has always been a disservice to myself, who never looked back on the past. I had no nostalgia. None for my childhood. When I read Speak, Memory, I feel such envy for a writer who can have that kind of connection to his past, and that kind of love, and to be able to describe it in those terms. I can’t. I can’t do it.

JBS: At one point in In Other Words you say that you think your parents were in constant mourning, and you realized finally that what they were mourning was their language.

JL: And everything that speaking one’s language represents.

JBS: Did you feel that they, maybe particularly your mother, were turned toward the past?

JL: As a child, I thought nostalgia was—you didn’t want to go near that stuff because that’s what my mom had. She thought about Calcutta all the time. She wanted to go back there. She wanted everything to remind her of Calcutta. Coming back from Italy, I recognized those behaviors. Hearing someone speak Italian on the street and almost starting to cry, going up to them and saying, “Can I please just talk to you?” These kind of desperate behaviors. But I think what makes my case interesting, or peculiar, is that of course all of this is a fiction. All of this is constructed. My nostalgia for Rome, my attachment to the language, all of it is something that I created, I have willfully created, unlike my mother’s experience. I come from a family where my father actively left his homeland and had his experience, my mother passively followed and had her experience, I actively left the world that was familiar to me, the United States, I went away. I found something I had been looking for my whole life, which was happiness, you know? And then I came back here, and I’m grieving because I don’t have that same happiness here. I wasn’t able to feel that happiness here, the freedom to feel happy. And so strangely the point of all this is that even though the nostalgia has been crushing at times in the past three months, I’m strangely proud of it. Because the fact of having it means I belong somewhere.

JBS: There’s no love without pain. These feelings are the proof that you have that engagement.

JL: Exactly. And what’s strange is that I don’t want to necessarily recover fully from it, because then I would be back in that place of, “Who am I? Where am I?”

JBS: Sounds a little like you don’t fully trust the happiness.

JL: I don’t know. I mean, I’m waiting.

JBS: I was also struck by how you say in the book, “For practically my whole life English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety.... English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.”

“ When I opened that door, when I went into the Italian room, all of that dolore of the past—the confusion, the conflict—It just went away. I could think about myself. ” — Jhumpa Lahiri

JL: Well, you just read that sentence out loud in translation, and I know that in English those words would never have come out of me. I would have been terrified to write those words. English is loaded. In my search to become my own person, to define myself in some way and not be defined by others, English represented feelings of guilt. The part of me that was speaking in English—reading, writing, having friendships—was not the part that felt I was my parents’ child. Now that I’m a parent myself, there’s the emotion that I’m sure you know, when your child discovers a book that meant something to you—it’s one of the most profound joys, one of those sacred moments. And I never had that as a child. I couldn’t connect to my parents on that level. Reading was this secret gift. Even as a little girl, I was aware when I read that finally, OK, here was the mission, here was my life—literature. The whole meaning of my life started the moment I discovered a library. And yet that dizzying sense of purpose and freedom and possibility was something I couldn’t share with my parents. That is why I learned Italian, because I wanted to feel at peace, and I wanted to be in a quiet room all by myself. When I opened that door, when I went into the Italian room, it was really quiet, and all of that dolore of the past—the confusion, the conflict, the feeling of what did it mean for me to be reading and writing vis-à-vis my parents and their world—it just went away. I could think about other things. And I could think about myself.

JBS: In Italian?

JL: In my Italian. It’s unusual, it’s imperfect. It is what it is. It’s not a language that courses through my veins or is firmly sedimented in my brain. There are all sorts of lapses and problems inherent in my ability to express myself in this language, and yet—

JBS: You feel more powerful?

JL: I feel so powerful. I feel like I can say anything I want to say. I think that’s what any artist is looking for, that freedom.

JBS: Do you think you might end up having a happier relationship with English?

JL: Maybe. I feel like I’m on the road right now. I’m moving through this, and it’s going to take me wherever it takes me. If I decide to never write in English again, apart from translating, who knows? But the translation project is a key part of this whole mystery. [Lahiri plans to translate a novel by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone into English for Europa Editions.] And of course my new book grew out of that first short story I wrote in Italian, about a translator.

JBS: That’s right, “The Exchange.”

JL: “The Exchange,” which is the first thing that landed in my lap a few months after we landed in Rome. And I thought, What the hell is that and how did that happen? And I was stunned not by its quality but by its existence, by its arrival. What does it mean to be working and thinking in this language? We write these things in this pure state sometimes when we’re in that empty room when nobody is listening. When we feel no one is looking over our shoulder, no one is waiting, no one is expecting anything. And that’s how I felt when I first was writing in Italian. That’s how that story was born. Nobody waiting, asking, assuming. People can say what they will about the story, but I’ve been trying to write that story my whole life.

Condensed and edited from John Burnham Schwartz’s interview with Jhumpa Lahiri.