Revisiting the Story:
Chen Okafor interviews Sophie Jai

Sophie Jai

Volunteer Chen Okafor talks with spring issue #234 contributor Sophie Jai about her short story, “Dead Weight.” They discuss characters you can’t leave behind, experimenting with form, and her upcoming second novel Choose: Happy.

Read an excerpt from "Dead Weight" here.

 

Sophie Jai is a Trinidadian writer. Her debut novel Wild Fires (2022, HarperCollins) won and has been shortlisted for several awards, including the 2023 Canadian Authors Association Fred Kerner Book Award, 2023 Toronto Book Awards, 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and the UK’s 2019 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. She has been a Writer-in-Residence and Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she received her masters in Creative Writing in 2025. She currently writes for the UK’s Royal Literary Fund’s WritersMosaic magazine and is working on her next novel Choose: Happy. She lives between Toronto and England.


What inspired you to write “Dead Weight”? Did any particular authors or stories serve as direct inspiration?

I’ve always been interested in stories about guilt. I began writing it three years ago as a screenplay while I was doing my masters in creative writing and experimenting with different forms. It didn’t quite work in that genre. Then, I took on the short story form and wrangled with it for about a year. To me, this—the short story—is the hardest form to write. My favourite writers are short story writers too—George Saunders, Alice Munro, Ottessa Moshfegh. I was determined not to give up on the form. I focused on “Dead Weight” for about six months before I felt it was ready to go out into the world.

I also love reading and writing deeply flawed characters. I think it makes us more empathic people. Ottessa Moshfegh is a master in this, which is why I love her work.

Is “Dead Weight” part of a longer project? Were you hinting at something more with respect to the relationship between Ms. Palmer and Daniel?

It’s not part of a larger work, no. But I have thought about revisiting the story in the form of a very short film. I absolutely was not hinting at anything between Ms. Palmer and Daniel—this didn’t even occur to me!

When Ms. Palmer told her daughter Lanny “Can we have a con-ver-sa-tion anymore without connecting it to social politics?” was that a commentary on our present state of affairs?

A little. But mainly it was about the divide between their generations, and yet another chasm of disconnect between the two characters.

What made you choose Nissi as a central figure in this story? Her accident and the impending aftermath seem to rival Noah’s death in terms of reader impact. Can you talk more about how you developed these two characters?

You know, that house that Nissi lives in, its characters, and her and her brother, are not characters I think I can ever leave behind. The house and these characters—Nissa and Noah too—are wildly similar to that in my first novel Wild Fires. In Strout’s novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, a character says, “‘You will have only one story. You’ll write your one story many ways. You have only one.”’ I really do believe that, sometimes.

What other projects are you working on?

I’ve just finished writing my second novel Choose: Happy. It’s about a woman who is diagnosed with menstrual mental health disorder while navigating a strained relationship with her partner, her family, and ultimately herself. It was wildly fun to write.

 

Chen Okafor

Chen Okafor