Laksmi Pamuntjak reflects on ‘Fall Baby’, her time in self-quarantine

Like many other people during self-quarantine, award-winning Indonesian novelist, poet and essayist Laksmi Pamuntjak went through different stages. In the first two months, she found it difficult to write anything other than emails and messages to friends asking how they were. “You’d think it is the most natural thing, to counter the loneliness and isolation with exterioration, to manifest all our fears and uncertainty in paper and ink. You’d think they would come pouring out of you,” she said in an email interview. But in reality, she did not write anything down, much less write about her feelings, thinking that everybody’s story seemed more pertinent than her own.