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He sat inside what he calls a closet in a small apartment in New York City and wrote 7,000 pages over 12-and-a-half years. Sometimes he thought he was 'chewing stones'. Later, he thought he had written a 'love letter' to his mother.

What finally came out of the closet was Family Life, a 228-page book described by The New York Times as one of the top 10 reads of 2014. And its 43-year-old author Akhil Sharma was hailed as a 'supernova' among young authors.

In India, certainly, he is a star. His session at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival on a January weekend is a hit with his readers who have grabbed every inch of space available at the venue to hear him. In his soft baritone, devoid of any visible emotion, he discusses how he put himself through the pain of reliving his past.

He tells his audience how his older brother, Anup, met with an accident in a swimming pool. Anup died three years ago, after being bedridden for three decades. The book is his tragic life story but not without humorous undertones. It is now being translated into half a dozen languages.

Family Life, he tells his audience, is an intensely personal and difficult story. He dedicated five hours every day to writing the book. 'In fact, I used to keep a stopwatch so I could do nothing else for those five hours. The goal was to sit at the writing desk for five hours. I was not responsible for producing anything but sitting there at the desk. If I checked my email or attended to a phone call in between, I used to pause the stopwatch and resume it only after I had finished with that.'

I have a great many questions in my mind when we meet after the session. Why did he have to sit in such a crammed space? Why did he force himself to write even when it was unproductive? Why did he want to write about such a tragic incident?

Instead, I ask if it was cathartic.

Sharma takes his time before replying. 'In some ways writing the book had been a catharsis.' He pauses some more. 'In some way it wasn't the writing or the thinking that was the catharsis but my response to a particular incident. When you look back you realise one day it is tragedy, one day it is comedy. The catharsis is the different choices I have when I look back.'

When you look back, you see a family from Delhi that moves to New York City for a better life. His mother worked in a sewing factory while his father was a cashier at a bank. But the tragedy left the family with little happiness.

Sharma immersed himself in his books and went on to earn his bachelor's degree in public policy from Princeton University and win a fellowship for a writing programme at Stanford. He completed his education with a law degree from the Harvard Law School (his wife, Lisa Swanson, is a corporate lawyer).

He started writing in the late 1990s, while still in college, and penned several prize-winning short stories. But his early ambition was to earn money and he knew writing wasn't a lucrative option. So he went into investment banking and managed to combine the long hours with producing his first novel, An Obedient Father, in 2001, which won him the PEN/Hemingway Award.

As a banker, he started earning a handsome 'mid-six-figure salary'. But a few years later, in the middle of writing Family Life, he quit his job to concentrate solely on the book. 'Writing is the only thing meaningful to me. Initially, I felt that money would make me feel safe but I realised it didn't. So I quit my job.'

Today, besides writing, he works as an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. 'Some days I am happy, some days I feel why did I do something so stupid,' he says of quitting his job.

But he is a prolific writer - his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and in collections of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Family Life is one of eight books shortlisted for the Folio Prize in the UK. The award, for the best English-language fiction from around the globe, will be announced in March.

Sharma is often asked why he chose to turn Family Life into a work of fiction and not a memoir. 'I wouldn't have been able to do justice to the emotions if I had kept it as a memoir,' he says. 'It would have been less dramatic,' he smiles. Sharma explains that fiction helped him make the book less tragic. As a child, his brother was a secret. He never spoke about him in his school. 'But in the book I make it dramatic by telling lies in school that I have a wonderful brother.'

Not being a memoir helped him handle his mother's questions with ease. 'My mom has read my book and she has often remarked, 'but it never happened that way'. Then I remind her it is fiction.'

In the competitive publishing world, where missing a deadline often leads to the cancellation of a contract, Sharma survived despite overshooting his deadline by nine years. His editors were supportive and patient when he insisted on not publishing the book until he was ready.

'Writing Family Life was a horrible experience. It was like chewing stones. I was 30 when I started the book and 42 by the time it finished. I almost spent my youth on that book,' he says.

But he wouldn't have had it any other way.

'The book looks effortless. It doesn't have a plot. So just figuring out how to write a book that read quickly without pauses took forever,' Sharma says. By his own admission, his story had very little plot and in the beginning itself the reader knew the end.

'Real life is plotless, but the experience of reading books that replicate this can be irritating,' he explains. 'In the drafts that I created - and these drafts took years to write and then abandon - I felt my reader, since he already knew the end, was wondering why I was not moving faster. I wanted the narrative to move like a rocket.'

Sharma drew inspiration from several writers while figuring out which style to adopt. He read Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, V.S. Naipaul and Anton Chekov. 'I have tried to learn writing from each one of them.'

He confesses that as a boy he liked dropping names of authors without having read them. 'I studied Hemingway's biography without reading any of his works. As a child I thought that was how it's done.'

That was when he was reading mostly science fiction and learning how to write short stories on his own. 'I wanted to forget myself so I immersed myself completely in books. The science fiction books that I read were rubbish but it helped.'

He has very little fond memories of childhood. 'It was a difficult childhood. Sickness is hard to live with. You endure these things. That's what kids do to comfort parents,' he confesses. He narrates an incident when, as a schoolboy walking with his mother, a group of young kids hurled racist remarks at them.

'I foolishly told my mom that those were boys from my school teasing me - so that she didn't feel bad. She also nodded, accepting my lie - so as to protect me. Those were the days when we lied to protect each other,' he says.

He leans back on the chair and, for the moment, is lost in the past. He is dressed in a purple pullover, paired with grey trousers and black leather shoes. His Armani spectacles are perched on his nose. The salt-and-pepper crew cut complements the mauve floral printed shirt that peeps out of his pullover.

Sharma believes every book of a writer is autobiographical. ' An Obedient Father is an autobiography of my guilt. I felt shame though I knew there was no need for that shame. I tried in narrative to figure out whether the shame was justified.' It is the story of a corrupt and sexually abusive bureaucrat based in India. 'Certain things are so bizarre. If you grow up with difficulties in a family you will never get away with the repercussions,' he says without divulging which part of An Obedient Father was from his life.

When asked about his inspiration, Sharma reveals his admiration for Abraham Lincoln. 'Lincoln famously said that he didn't want admiration but wanted to be deserving of admiration,' he says. 'Like him, I would like to be loved, and admired in the long run if I am deserving of it.'

I have to ask the question about the crammed closet. He explains that it was a small kitchen with a tiny window that he had turned into closet with just enough space for a desk and a chair. 'I like the idea of being compressed. The physical intensity of a compressed space allows complete concentration,' he says.

It was the space - and the love for his family - that pushed him to carry on. 'My parents were my motivation for this book,' he says during the lit fest interaction. 'In fact, I would say that this book is a love letter to my mother.'