'May all women be intemperate.' Seattle author Sonora Jha's new novel is for anyone who wants to live big 23%
By Katie Campbell0%
5/25/2026, 4:04:31 PM
Topics: Books
Keywords: Books, Literature, Arts And Life, Arts, Seattle, Sonora Jha, Intemperance, Kuow Book Club, Seattle Public Library
BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Indoctrination, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 23.9% saturation with 293 hits. Analysis detected 1,564 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,228 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.9% and a BS Rank of 23% (17,041 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 77.90% of the article peer group.
The KUOW Book Club read "Intemperance" by Sonora Jha in May.
Jha joined KUOW's Katie Campbell live at Seattle Central Library last week to talk about love, aging, and the feats she might ask a man to complete to win her hand in marriage.
This was the season finale of KUOW's winter Book Talks series in partnership with the Seattle Public Library.
Listen to the conversation below or find it in the "Meet Me Here" feed on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Everything I loved about Sonora Jha's latest novel is everything I love about Jha herself.
"Intemperance" is sharp, funny, and unabashedly extra.
Readers who enjoyed Jha's 2023 novel "The Laughter" will come to this new work expecting her cutting style of storytelling, and they'll get that.
But they'll also get an unexpected dose of magical realism that is new to her work.
Though that's not Jha's usual vibe, the magic of "Intemperance" is perfectly executed.
The novel follows a 55-year-old woman, a professor, in present-day Seattle who decides to hold a swayamvar, an ancient Indian custom in which suitors compete in a feat of will and strength to win a beautiful princess's hand in marriage.
To her surprise, her decision causes quite a scandal, drawing criticism from a faraway family member, her own son, and a collection of ethereal women, goddesses in the flesh.
"I hadn't planned on [the magical realism]," Jha said.
"I knew that goddesses were going to show up in some way, but I wasn't sure how I was going to bring them in.
Then, there was a woman on the bus, and I realized, 'Oh my gosh, these women are going to show up, these deities are going to show up as ordinary people.'"
And show up they did.
The core story of "Intemperance" would've worked just fine on its own.
And much of what takes place in our shared reality is hilarious and complete all on its own.
There's the social media firestorm that descends on the main character — whose name we never learn, so I call her The Professor — after she publicly announces her swayamvar.
There's the long process of planning a wedding, which has its ups and downs for the bride-to-be who does not yet have a groom — the plan is to marry the winner of her swayamvar immediately after the feats are completed.
And there are the many relationship dynamics playing out around The Professor: with her friends, new acquaintances, her son, and a deeply annoying, presumptuous distant cousin.
Jha is an excellent character writer, and the kind of character she seems best at writing is a deeply annoying, presumptuous man.
She's done it again with this guy.
Here's just a sampling of the letters he sends The Professor, insisting she is only holding a swayamvar because the women of her family are cursed and that she must stop this at once:
There are some who say that if you have had two divorces [which The Professor has], the problem must be with you, not the men.
But I am not one of those people.
Still, when I heard that you have not only been possessed by the curse that marked the ladies and the ladylike men of our ancestors but that you have also been cursed with twisted ankles like the daayans of our villages, I put a stone on my heart and put pen to paper.
(A daayan is a witch in India folklore.)
This guy.
The Professor had polio as a child and was later in a car accident that shattered one of her ankles.
She uses a cane, and she's self-conscious about how this makes other people see her and interact with her.
For this guy to refer to her disability as a curse on her is really something else, on top of all the terrible homophobic and classist things he has to say throughout his correspondence to The Professor, a woman he has never met.
"I had polio as a baby," Jha said.
"There's a lot of stigma attached to disability in India, and I had to face that.
People in the streets could just taunt me, and it was considered OK."
She wanted The Professor to have those experiences, too, and to be a vehicle for Jha to exorcise the ableism that existed then and still exists now.
"We're still writing a lot of younger women in literature.
We've just started writing middle-aged women.
We've just started writing disabled women," she said.
"The power and agency that you can give to characters who are on the margins is far more interesting to me.
That's what I wanted to do.
It doesn't come from a place of activism, like, 'Let me write this social justice book.'
These are the people in my life."
That's the magic of "Intemperance," too: the way it feels so real even as The Professor is visited by goddesses and having visions of the past.
I think it's so relatable because it's about a woman who wants to live life to the utmost degree.
She wants the most out of this life, especially after seeing what the past held for others in love, and she's willing to do the hard thing to get it.
Intemperance means "a lack of moderation."
The curse The Professor's cousin writers to tell her about is a curse of intemperance.
I curse this family on behalf of another mother and from my own heart.
May no woman married into this household ever bear a sturdy son.
May your daughters henceforth be twisted.
May they be willful and wayward.
May they be daayan and churail.
May they bring your Brahmin family shame upon shame.
May they be cursed with intemperance.
Jha said she picked this word for the title because intemperance can be a blessing, too.
She told the story of Sita in Hindu mythology.
Sita is told to stay in a circle of protection, but she leaves the circle when she sees a beautiful deer just on the other side.
(This is an extremely abbreviated version of the story, apologies.)
"All hell breaks loose, like terrible things happen to her," Jha said.
"And I just feel like, no, the terrible thing that happened was the fact that the world was not ready for you to run after a deer."
The Professor runs after the deer.
She chases love with the help of a swayamvar.
She makes her own circle of protection and expands it out, out, out to include so many new people, moderation be damned.
"May all women be intemperate.
May our daughters, our girls be raised to be intemperate," Jha said.
"May an intemperate woman be loved, and may she love herself, and may she discover worlds upon worlds and deer upon deer and husband upon husband."
Jha was the grand finale of this season of KUOW Book Club author interviews in partnership with the Seattle Public Library.
There will not be a live conversation in June, though we'll still release another interview on the homepage and through our newsletter.
Plus, we've planned a summer series with SPL.
Details will be released soon.
Subscribe to the KUOW Book Club newsletter here to stay in the know.
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86%flagged-word coverageSonora Jha
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