Writing About Places When You Don’t Live There

Tuesday, May 18, 2021: For the second night in a row, I’ve had dreams about the Maldives. The clear, aquamarine water lapping at my feet, the faces of the people we met—Mandy from Singapore, Henry from Costa Rica, Gandip from India. There’s a high that I’m on that I haven’t gotten from most vacations. Maybe it’s the impossibility of it all, that there is a raft of culture in the middle of the ocean, that, if you take the time to get to know the people around you, it’s not JUST a beach.

I didn’t know, back then, a couple of weeks after my first visit to the Maldives, that I’d end up writing a novel inspired by my time there. I’d gone on vacation and parlayed the trip into a journalistic assignment, writing about how the island nation in the middle of the Indian Ocean was faring in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-escalating effects of climate change. The headline: “The Maldives Knows Y.O.L.O.,” ended up being prescient. Incidentals, my third novel, is a murder mystery set in the Maldives, with a cast of characters intent on squeezing every last drop out of life, turning a juicy wedge of lime into a dried-up husk.

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They say to write what you know—I live in Los Angeles, approximately 10,000 miles away from the Maldives. When I came up with the idea for Incidentals, I knew that relocating to paradise—a place where the breezes are balmy enough to bottle and the water looks as if it was CGI-ed—in the name of “research” was not in the cards, as fabulous as that would’ve been. Similarly, I couldn’t hole up at a vineyard like I did while drafting Friends in Napa, my second novel, about a reunion of college friends gone outrageously wrong.

I could visit, yes. I could photograph the sea, the sky, the umbrella-laden drinks, the breakfast buffet—resplendent, it spread out over several rooms, and I could never figure out how to focus the real estate of my plate. But the most important part of writing about a place that’s foreign to you? The people. Specifically, getting to know the people who make the destination hum, who call it home.

I wrote their names down in my notebook, that first time. Mandy from Singapore was the butler assigned to my husband and I during our stay at LUX North Male, a resort on Olhahali Island in the North Male Atoll. Lest you assume that we’re high rollers—butlers are standard at resorts across the Maldives, and their main responsibility includes ferrying their charges from overwater bungalows to other parts of the property via boardwalks that generally don’t have railings. Consider them an insurance policy.

“Especially after happy hour,” Mandy said. Which begged the question—how many tipsy, perhaps even unruly, vacationers had she had to deal with during her island tenure? Mandy declined to elaborate but her laugh told me what I needed to know. There was more to this story, and the more questions I asked, not only of Mandy but also of the head chef, the bartender, and other staffers, the more I learned about how work and life blend together in the Maldives to create a universe that felt ripe for drama.

“It can get lonely,” said Raja, another staffer. “Working long hours, spending weeks and months away from home.” This is one of the many factors that sets the Maldives apart from other vacation destinations—most Maldivian resorts occupy an island of their own, and the staff live in quarters not far from where guests stay. Think summer camp but swap the verdant meadows and evergreen forests for swaying palm trees and turquoise waves. Or a college campus—that might’ve been an even better way to picture it, given that a LUX staffer said their accommodations were a lot like dorms. 

Our time at LUX was up but as we set off for destination No. 2, Joali, a resort on the northern Muravandhoo Island, I made it my mission to befriend more staffers. Mandy and her colleagues had been more than hospitable. They’d shared their own favorite vacation destinations—Paris, London—and why they preferred working in this hodgepodge of islands over others. “I like the culture here better than that of the Caribbean," said Taylor, a chef from Australia. “Plus,” her sous chef chimed in, “the Maldives looks pretty good on a CV.”

As we boarded a seaplane to Joali, I was beginning to understand the myriad motivations that might compel someone to give up everything they know and hack out a living in the middle of the ocean. Money and status, of course, but the closer I looked, the more I listened—eavesdropping being one of my all-time favorite hobbies—and the more questions I asked, the more I realized that this island nation ran on camaraderie as much as anything else. As a writer of fiction, I had to wonder—what if not everyone was so cordial? What if there was a bad apple in the bunch?

To be sure, there are no bad apples at Joali, which might be my favorite resort on the planet. Palatial overwater bungalows, green marble bathing suites—more than mere rooms—a sandbar that makes the sea feel like it’s parting just for you—the whole place conspires to make you feel like royalty, and the staff has everything to do with that.

Over breakfast, a multi-room spread so impressive that my camera roll contains a dozen photos of it, I began chatting them up. How did they end up in the Maldives? Where do they call home? Where did they go when they were off the clock?

“The staff bar,” a server named Tushar said as he refilled my coffee for the fourth time. There was a staff bar! “Oh yeah,” he said. “They even have cosmos now, after me sending emails asking for cosmos for two months.”

Unknowingly, Tushar had given me a mission, and I chose to accept it. If I really wanted to know what made the staffers of the Maldives tick, if I wanted to portray this improbable place accurately as a journalist and an author, I had to get into the staff bar. The elements were on my side. After one day at Joali, the weather turned; torrential rain and gale force winds made outdoor activity pretty much impossible. My husband and I had gotten to know Tushar over gin and sake tastings (“What else can one do in this weather?” Tushar said with a shrug). On our last night, he extended an invitation: Did we want to come to the staff bar after dinner?

Beneath an overhang, sipping $3 gin and tonics, we traded Netflix recommendations, cryptocurrency opinions (Dogecoin was all the rage, back in 2021), and gripes about the state of the world. Watching the staffers razz each other, palling around with these relative strangers who now felt like family, I realized that this was the feeling I wanted to capture on the page—how, removed from your everyday routine, you might become fast friends with someone you just met. And if they’re not the benevolent magicians like the ones that populate Joali—Joali calls its butlers Jadugars, an Urdu word that roughly translates to “magician”—you might get cast under the sort of spell that plagues Sarah, one of the main characters in Incidentals.

I returned to Joali in 2024 as I was drafting the novel and left with a new set of notes: “Air like warm soup. Thick humidity on skin. The squelch of sand beneath your feet. The vibration of the boardwalk beneath the wheels of a bike.” My wheels were turning, and while the spectacular setting of the Maldives got them in motion, it was the people I met there that kept them going.

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