“A Flesh and Blood Portrait”
A conversation with Mayukh Sen about ‘Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star.’
For the February edition of the Desk Salon Series, I talked to author Mayukh Sen about transitioning from food to film writing, his biography process, and the complications of writing about a woman who had to lie to survive. Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star is out on March 4, 2025.
After the paywall below, you’ll find the audio, video, and the full transcript.
Mayukh Sen: First of all, thank you for the very kind words. I think that this applies to Taste Makers and Love, Queenie as a first step in my biography writing process, quote, unquote: I try to just build a foundation of the piece by finding my story subject speaking in their own words. That was pretty cut and dry with Taste Makers, but I realized in writing Love, Queenie, I realized how naive I was when I was writing Taste Makers in the sense that I remember—I was kind of talking about this a lot in interviews that I gave for Taste Makers. I was like, Yeah, I want to find these women like, you know, framing their stories on their own terms, and their memoirs and interviews, yada yada.
But then, when it comes to a book like Love, Queenie and a subject like Merle Oberon, she was someone who—her life was filled with constant evasions, and she lied about her life because she had to. She had to survive. And so as a result, so much of the archival material that I came across, essentially had her saying, oh, you know, as a child in Tasmania and all that kind of stuff, stuff that we now know to be absolute bunk, right?
It's just kind of this PR line rather than her authentic, true life. And so I think that part of what this book forced me to do is really learn how to read between the lines and essentially say, like, okay, you know, what is fact here and what is fiction? She's making a certain claim about the way that her fabricated backstory went, that she was born in Tasmania, but then when she was very young, she moved with a rich family member to India. So India was not completely airbrushed from her backstory, right? And then after that, she went to London and became a big star, yada yada, when, in reality, she had been born and raised in India, in poverty, right?
But whatever, she would give quotes to the press about her upbringing in India. I would have to ask myself, like, How much truth is there to that? And, you know, How much is she just completely making up? So that was a real challenge in terms of just kind of building the scaffolding of my narrative through her own words. I really had to kind of toss a lot of what she was telling us about her upbringing, or her parents or her childhood, yada yada. And what I did try to do was locate her interior life when I could, at any juncture.
