Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood.

Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer, I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money. There are also so many emotional aspects to money - feelings of inadequacy, feelings of security. I am not sure if there needs to be more about money in fiction, but the absence of this aspect can make a story feel somehow frictionless and unreal.

People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.