Because we say it is a calling, one assumes an artist can respond to the notion of their destiny directly. For many artists, however, and certainly writers, this calling is only available at the end of a complex maze of other responses. Writer Mayukh Sen dreamed of writing about film, but was offered quite a different route: writing about food. He was nonetheless grateful when that writing afforded him accolades, and a book deal for Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. One can already see a continuity in his style, as he approached the cooking subjects as one might a movie star. Still, he understood that the calling continued to ring for him. He has met the moment with Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, a biography of the overlooked 1930s starlet, whose mixed race South Asian lineage was erased in a too familiar story of American subterfuge. Love, Queenie is a generous history of a then still burgeoning film industry compounded by the realities of gender, race, and geopolitical identity. The tome earned him a finalist commendation by the National Book Critics Circle, and contributes to his selection as a 2026 USA Writing Fellow. We daresay he has met his destiny as a historiographer of culture at large.

Anne Ishii: You’ve had some inflection points in your career, and talked about the difference between reporting, food writing, and the biography you wrote recently. Could you tell us about these moves in history writing?

Mayukh Sen: I should begin by stating outright that my childhood aspiration was actually to be a film critic. I was a very young person who was an Oscar-obsessive! I would hoard old issues of Entertainment Weekly and watch Ebert & Roeper — it was no longer Siskel and Ebert when I was a teenager. I treated the Oscars as a sporting event, in the same way some might think of the Super Bowl. That was very much something that I inherited from my father, who was a hardcore cinephile and would on occasion spend his spare time making short films or writing plays. That’s where the rose began to bloom, so to speak. 

Fast forward to a few years later when I finished undergrad. I came back east, settled in New York, and began a career as a freelance journalist writing about all these different aspects of culture like, film, television, music, what have you. I got this email from an editor at Food52 who asked, “Have you ever thought of being a food writer? We're looking for a staff writer who is not necessarily a home cook nor a restaurant enthusiast, but can write about culture through the lens of food.” That was something that I had never even considered because food writing, in my mind's eye, had always been the province of the white elite, the wealthy. Something I was very much not. 

I say all that to make it clear that food writing was never part of the plan that I had envisioned for myself. A lot of my work within it had to do with finding my place and trying to lessen my imposter syndrome. The way I metabolized that insecurity was by drifting to figures who reminded me of myself in some way, figures who were on the margins, whether by dint of their race, their class background, their sexuality, or a combination of those demographic factors. Through resuscitating their stories, I would come to better understand my place in this industry that I really did not feel I had a place in. After a few years of doing that I thought I owed it to myself to pursue my passion, which was writing about film, ultimately. 

In making that leap, I started to ask myself what the link was between these two different modes and these genres — writing about food and writing about film. I found that I was always interested in the human element of these stories. What interested me about food writing was not necessarily the object of food itself, but the person who made it, and what brought them to that line of work, and how they perceived it as an art. That sort of sensibility carried over to my writing about film, because in writing this single subject biography of this actress, Merle Oberon, I was interested in what drew her to the art. What were the challenges and the circumstantial barriers that she faced in trying to make her voice heard in a deeply prejudicial industry? 

I had to train myself to allow my reader to taste the food that I was writing about just as I was able to, or just as this woman whom I was writing about was able to. By that same token, what I forced myself to do when I was writing about Merle Oberon was to write about each of these films that she was in as if my reader were sitting right alongside me on my couch or in the movie theater. I wanted to make them feel exactly what I was feeling as I was watching this film. I think transmitting that experience of engaging with the art, whether it's food or film, is really top of mind for me, no matter what I am writing about.

Anne: Food writing in the diaspora is interesting because food is the first place of ingress for the colonizer. The American status quo will go straight to the food if they want to say they know a culture. Maybe if you could say a little bit more about what you think about the historicism, history, or historiography of communities. 

Mayukh: When I first got into food media a decade ago, I was writing from a different center of gravity than most of my peers because I had grown up in a Bengali, immigrant household. The foods that I ate growing up and the vocabulary around food just differed from that of my colleagues, all of whom were a very specific genre of person. They were all white women in Bed-Stuy. I love them dearly and they taught me so much, but they had a very specific way of thinking about food that differed from my own. I realized that a version of that recurs throughout food history. I would look at who is canonized, and it's often figures like Julia Child, for example, or James Beard. Two figures who are very much deserving of their canonization, given their talent, their skill, the lives they touched, and so on and so forth. But I was interested in interrogating whose presence, whose impact may have been minimized as a result of those dynamics. And so I would start to look at the narrative margins, too, when I was searching for story subjects. 

When I was writing Taste Makers, for example, I would often field questions from people who were excited to read, and they'd ask me, “How did you find different subjects for this book?” I would search the phrase “the Julia Child of (insert cuisine)” in every newspaper or archival database I could find. As I write in that book, so many women throughout American culinary history have been tagged the Julia Child of their respective countries or regions of origin, in a way that may have felt appropriate in decades past, but today might seem quite dated and patronizing. Oftentimes, I would become aware by putting myself through the exercise of considering which figures, who were popular in their time, did not have the stamina or longevity to last into the present day. That carried over into writing Love, Queenie about Merle Oberon. 

Merle Oberon was a star in her time; the peak of her career was the 1930s. I faced great difficulty in the past few years before my book came out getting people to care about her story.  She was a figure who was not unlike Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, or even Barbara Stanwyck — all these names whom many people my age know. My question was why.  Why has Merle Oberon’s presence, her impact, been minimized in the American mind? There are systemic answers to that question. That is what motivated me through both projects, to look at who's been erased, and ask myself why that was, and make sure that in answering those questions, I did not lose sight of the human at the center of my story.

Anne: You said that for years you had to fight for buy-in. How did you win people over into actually paying attention? How did you get agents and publishers to become interested? What worked?

Mayukh: That's a good question. I'm still figuring that out. When I sold Taste Makers, it was in late 2018, and that was very much a cultural moment in which there was this overarching  concern for “the overlooked,” and in particular the overlooked woman. This was around the time that The New York Times had begun its Overlooked project, in which they spotlighted obituaries of women whom they had not published obituaries for when they had passed away. I was fortunate in that Taste Makers, despite the advance not being some wildly large amount, was able to sell because there was a hunger and appetite, excuse the puns. They were completely here for the stories of women who deserved more attention.

It was a much more difficult struggle with Merle Oberon because when I was trying to sell my publisher on this book around four years ago, it was a story that had lived inside me for a very long time. I had been passionate about telling this story since I was in high school. The question was, why tell this woman's story now? What relevance does it have to the present day? Sometimes you don't have the answers to those questions when you set out to do a project. I had to argue very passionately to my publisher, and in particular to my editor, who is a superstar and has always had my back, about why I felt like the right person to tell this story that I felt had been mishandled by so many parties for so long.

Back when I was first conceiving of this project, I didn't realize that it would be released into this current climate that we inhabit, which demonizes immigrants so openly and brazenly. I would say that a political consciousness seeped into my writing as I was working through drafts of this book. I've been thinking about this a lot because it's been a year since that book came out. I'm very grateful for everything that this past year has given me with this book because it has been a long-gestating passion project for me.

Anne: I can't help but make the observation that you're writing about people who are no longer alive. I'm curious if you have a similar curiosity about living artists. What do you think is your relationship to history? What's your relationship to the living arts?

Mayukh: This is a question that was constantly circling through my mind, especially as I was writing Taste Makers, because two of the seven women in that book are still with us: Julie Sahni and Najmieh Batmanglij. I can say now that I'm on the other side of this project that I love them dearly. I came to love them while writing that book, even if I was trying to maintain a sort of reportorial distance. But I think it was a real challenge for me to write about living subjects within the confines of that book, and I think this holds true anytime I write about an artist who is still with us, because in writing about artists, I often ask myself, well, what is their legacy? How can we measure an artist's legacy to begin with? It's so difficult to quantify sometimes, and sometimes you can't quantify it at all. I find that I have an easier time writing about figures who are no longer with us because their legacies have had more time to settle in the popular mind in a way that is much harder to see with as much clarity as possible when you're writing about the living.

That's one challenge that I hope I can overcome in the next few years, if I do write about artists who are still with us, because I realize there's a lot of power in being able to write about artists who are still actively creating and working today. If your writing honors their sincerity of intent, you can have a tangible impact on their lives. I think one of the most heartening aspects of seeing Taste Makers out in the world was hearing from those two women, Julie and Najmieh, that the book has moved the needle for them. That warms my heart. And you're deprived of that when you are writing about deceased figures.

I will say that as I write about in Taste Makers, and to a lesser extent, Love, Queenie, loss has been a very large part of my life since my childhood, especially when my dad died almost a decade ago. I was well into my twenties but he'd been sick for most of my life. I lived throughout my adolescence and into my adulthood with the knowledge that there would be a future in which he would no longer be in the picture, and I would have to work much harder to preserve the essence of who he was, and the ways in which he impacted my life. I think my writing about deceased figures is often my way of working through the wound of that loss which, almost a decade on, is still not fully healed.

Anne: Wow. I want to sit with that for a moment. I think in this country, we deal with death pretty poorly. It’s a complicated ritual for those of us in the diaspora because our mourning practices are traditions borrowed from where we came from. Perhaps this is an inappropriate way to put it, but it feels like grief may even be a North Star in your style of writing. How do you manage grief? How do you appreciate rituals of grief? Is writing one?

Mayukh: That is a fascinating question. I did not deal with my grief very well in the immediate aftermath of my father's death. I have been six years sober now, almost to the day. You may intuit that I had a problem after my dad's death in particular. I am very fortunate that I am able to be on the other side of a drinking problem that I had developed, and to be alive and be my best self now. 

This might sound unhealthy, but one way in which I try to channel my grief is through my writing. In my career, what I've always told myself is I wish my dad were alive to see this. My dad’s true animating passion was writing, making short films, and crafting plays and whatnot, yet he was not in a position to monetize that dream and make a life for himself in this country in a way that I am fortunate to. When I say monetize, I mean barely, of course. I have made peace with the fact that I will probably be some version of poorer throughout the rest of my life, but I’m able to pay my bills through my creative work in a way that he wasn't able to because he arrived in this country in the 1980s as an Indian immigrant. It was not easy for him to survive, especially to break into those sorts of spaces. I try to honor my father's memory through that creative work, and that's not to say that I'm mimicking him in any way, or I'm just creating for my father. It's more that I try to remind myself of just how blessed I am. I'm sorry to sound like a Hallmark card, but I really mean it, you know? 

Anne: Hallmark! You’re talking to the right person.

Mayukh: I'm glad you're simpatico here. How blessed am I to be able to memorialize him in this  way. This is a sort of life I can safely say he wanted to live but he was deprived of that chance for so many reasons. I'm going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts, and I hope it lasts for the rest of my life.

Love, Queenie is now available in paperback.