By Jenny Harrington Lill

Special to the Reporter

Vauhini Vara is a polymath of the writing world. She is a journalist, editor, fiction writer and mentor.

In 2022, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her debut novel, “The Immortal King Rao.” This month, Vara added memoirist to her list of accomplishments. Her new nonfiction essay collection, “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” hits especially close to home. Before Vara wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website, before she wrote and edited for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and other publications, including Businessweek, and long before she joined the Wall Street Journal as a first technology reporter to cover the Facebook beat, Vara’s voice could be heard on KMIH 104.5.

In “Searches,” Vara recounts the rise of Seattle’s tech megaliths — both she and the giants came of age at the same time. Her connection to Seattle began as an eighth-grader at Islander Middle School when her dad took a job at Boeing. On her dad’s decision to move her family to Mercer Island, in “Searches,” Vara writes, “The suburb he had chosen for us was called Mercer Island which enchanted me and my sister.” She describes it as “A whole town pressed onto an island. On maps, Mercer Island resembled a footprint in the middle of Lake Washington.” Those of us who have the great fortune to live here can picture this footprint; we know the treasured landmarks she describes: the floating bridge and island, “so densely covered with trees it appeared green at first.” Vara beautifully captures our images of home.

When Vara and her family first arrived, she was in awe, “As if we’d be living in a forest.” She shares that her dad chose this verdant paradise because Vara’s father had learned, “In the United States, well-off places were the ones with good public schools.”

“Searches” does more than wax poetic on Mercer Island and its schools. It is a complicated, sweeping criticism of tech and artificial intelligence, interwoven with personal narrative. ChatGPT is a character in the book that gives manuscript feedback throughout. This form of dialog — being in conversation with AI — is not new for Vara. To many readers, she is best known for her GPT-3-assisted and acclaimed essay “Ghosts” (Believer, 2021), where she discusses and processes the death of her sister, Krishna D. Vara, a 1998 graduate of MIHS who died of cancer in 2001. “Ghosts” has been aired on “This American Life” and adapted into a theatrical meditation on grieving in a technological world. Grief, creativity, technology and capitalism are just a few of the themes Vara tackles as she questions the use of AI in writing.

Vara embodies the rock-solid foundation that public schools can provide. She graduated from MIHS in 2000 and attended Stanford University. In “Searches,” Vara describes receiving a call from Lan Samantha Chang to announce her acceptance to the Iowa Writers Workshop — a call every writer dreams of receiving. Vara has made a name for herself in the literary community — she seamlessly blends genres and is on the edge of inventing new ones. In the process, she has put Mercer Island and Mercer Island schools on the map.

Vara will be at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle in conversation with Emily M. Bender at 7 p.m. on April 23.