Jhumpa Lahiri on dual cultural identity

In a special issue of Newsweek on modern India, author Jhumpa Lahiri writes about "her two lives":

According to my parents I was not American, nor would I ever be no matter how hard I tried. I felt doomed by their pronouncement, misunderstood and gradually defiant. In spite of the first lessons of arithmetic, one plus one did not equal two but zero, my conflicting selves always canceling each other out.

Lahiri's most recent novel The Namesake continues selling well in hardback; it was number 594 today, 17 months after its release.