WE can’t imagine chef-actress-writer Maria Goretti with a frown. It’s possibly because in all our time as a journalist, we haven’t seen her do anything but smile. Her poems have the same vibe, to use 2023’s top emotional term. Her latest book of poems, To the Moon and Back: Life, Love and Everything In-between (Om Books Inter ational) is about love, the pain it brings, the madness that surrounds it, but also the happiness that bathes it. She’s talking to us over a phone call from Goa about heartbreak and the relentless search for the self, and yet, she ends it with a flourish of hope. “So, every time you think there is no other way, hold yourself tight, and watch that little ember in you sparkle away”, she writes in Sparkle. “So, I’m avoiding all the roads, I’m walking only on tiny paths, untrodden, I’m not going to build anymore picket fences with everything, unsaid. So, while I go about my day, I pray that in peace and love, I will find my own way.” This is a line from The Last Time.

Edited excerpts from the interview.