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"I would follow Priyanka Mattoo to the ends of the earth, because she would know what to eat there, and how to make a friend, and then sit me down and tell me a story." —Emma Straub
Priyanka Mattoo was born into a wooden house in the Himalayas, as were most of her ancestors. In 1989, however, mounting violence in the region forced Mattoo’s community to flee. The home into which her family poured their dreams was reduced to a pile of rubble.
Mattoo never moved back to her beloved Kashmir—because it no longer existed. She and her family just kept packing and unpacking and moving on. In forty years, Mattoo accumulated thirty-two different addresses, and she chronicles her nomadic existence with wit, wisdom, and an inimitable eye for light within the darkest moments. She takes us from her grandparents’ sprawling home in Srinagar, where her boisterous aunties raced through the halls, to Saudi Arabia, where friendships were gained and lost behind the sandstone walls of a foreigners’ compound. We witness her courtship with a nice Jewish boy, now her husband, and her efforts to replicate her mother’s rogan josh recipe via Zoom. And we are with her as she settles into her unlikely new homeland, Los Angeles, where she sets off on what is perhaps her most meaningful journey: that of becoming a writer.
Through these astonishingly poignant and often laugh-out loud essays, Mattoo has given us an openhearted, frank, revealing glimpse into a journey of almost constant motion, as well as a journey of self-discovery.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 18, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593906965
- File size: 260061 KB
- Duration: 09:01:47
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 15, 2024
Film producer Mattoo reflects on leaving Kashmir during the violent 1980s in her insightful and surprisingly funny debut. After looting and vandalism reduced her childhood home from “the Platonic ideal of a mountain dwelling” to rubble resembling “the world’s most expensive LEGO set,” a nine-year-old Mattoo fled Kashmir with her family. Over the next three decades, she resided in more than 30 different addresses, a peripatetic lifestyle she tracks in freewheeling essays that discuss her obsession with ChapStick trends in Saudi Arabia, her fascination with her newborn baby brother in England, and her difficulty adjusting to American teenage mores in the suburbs of New York. “Life abroad... inevitably chipped away at the pieces I carried of my homeland,” Mattoo writes of the emptiness she felt as her family shuffled between apartments and hotel rooms. But her loving snapshots of relatives and childhood memories preserve what pieces remain, and as the narrative unfolds, acceptance sets in. “I might live with this feeling of hovering between years and places... for the rest of my life,” Mattoo muses in the final pages. “So I suppose I’d better get comfortable with it.” Distinguished by its sharp wit and beating heart, this is a salve for wanderers of all stripes. Agent: Erin Malone, WME.
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