I came across this book as this was the book of the month at the Sanskaari Girls Book Club. I later found out that “it’s all in your head, m” has also made its way to Forbes India’s Best Books of 2020 list. This book has also been one of the very few memoirs I’ve read by an Indian, and I’m glad I started off the reading month of January 2021 with this book.
Manjiri starts off by telling us about her boyfriend, called Avinash, and how unrequited love always sticks around, how suffocating mothers can make kids emotionally dependent on others, and how she felt that “No one stays with a fat girl (in a relationship)”. She also describes her traumatic experience with the Rotavirus disease, a virus that usually spreads easily among infants and young children and not fully grown adults.
The reader is then invited to her childhood home, full of complex interpersonal relationships, and a place where life threw too many challenges for her young, tender age. She writes about the sexual abuse she faced at the hands of a person the entire society thought was god’s gift to earth, and how the silence of people who were supposed to protect her confused her and made her feel angry.
Manjiri also writes beautifully about the hours she spent reading, and how the various people in her life lent their libraries to her and made her the reader she is today. There are beautiful poems written by the author interspersed in between the chapters at the right moments so that the reader can understand the roots of the poem and where exactly those emotions portrayed stem from. This is something, from the perspective of a person who wants to understand the mindset of the author, and the reason for choosing the specific words and phrases that they chose, that makes the process of understanding the author’s life experience more fluid.
The non-linear narrative in this book is a successful attempt at uncovering silences that usually linger around when you’re a woman. The silences justified as necessary by society in order to be a good daughter, good grand-daughter, good partner, good friend, and the toll those silences take on our psyche and physical health. All these silences have a funny, in a non-funny way, of being interlinked in ways that are not apparent prima facie.
Many passages in the book felt instantly relatable to me, like the ones about bingeing Netflix all day in my room in a fit of depression, or the constant fear I had as a kid that if my parents don’t come back home from their shopping at the time they said they would be home, something bad has happened to them (when we didn’t have mobile phones), searching for a therapist who is the perfect fit.
This book is a must-read because it’s not just a memoir, it’s a book that has condensed the author’s entire perspective of life, flaws and all into a book that can be read by you within 4 hours. It would be unwise for me to try and condense everything that the author has covered in this book, because frankly, I’d rather you read the book yourself and ponder upon the words crafted by Manjiri.
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