180 pages. Published Oct. 1, 2024 by University of North Carolina Press. Non-fiction anthology/essays.
The tongue-in-cheek title of this essay collection gives you a clue: it’s something someone said to the author, a brown woman immigrant in the US. (The sheer audacity, really.) Dasgupta collects here her thoughts on and experiences of her family of origin, her hair, her predilection for visiting cemeteries (a cultural experience for her, being Hindu), how she got her green card because of a chocolate-marmalade wedding cake, formative childhood experiences with boys, and a work trip to Italy. These are essays on womanhood, being a wife, Living While Brown and Travelling While Brown, being othered and being a stranger, migration and life in the US, food and cooking, heritage and inheritance, books and reading, faith, religion, secularity, language, and more. With breadth and depth, it’s a wonderful, affecting, compulsively readable and often humorous collection of thoughts on a life.
Thank you to University of North Carolina Press and NetGalley for early access.
Affiliate link: Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here.
Harare Review of Books 
Leave a comment