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Yashvi Peeti is an aspiring writer and an aspiring penguin. She has worked as an editorial intern with Penguin Random House India and HarperCollins Publishers India. She is always up for fangirling over poetry, taking a walk in a park, and painting tiny canvases. You can find her on Instagram @intangible.perception

View All posts by Yashvi Peeti

Yashvi Peeti is an aspiring writer and an aspiring penguin. She has worked as an editorial intern with Penguin Random House India and HarperCollins Publishers India. She is always up for fangirling over poetry, taking a walk in a park, and painting tiny canvases. You can find her on Instagram @intangible.perception

View All posts by Yashvi Peeti

The love I have for this book is unreal, and I’m so happy to be recommending it to you. I picked this up in a bookstore in Mumbai, entirely because of its gorgeous cover (and also because of my unspoken rule to never leave a bookstore empty-handed). When I got home and started to read it, I was delighted to find out that it’s set in the city I bought it from! In some cases, judging the book by its cover goes your way. This story is even more gorgeous, gripping, and heart-wrenching than its cover. Jerry Pinto is one of my favourite authors that I have stumbled upon through a happy accident.

Em and The Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

We follow a family of four: mother, father, son and daughter. The story largely centres around Em, the mother. We watch as the family navigates her manic depression, her suicide attempts, the instability of her condition that exists in ways both small and big. We watch Hoom, the father, try to hold it together for everyone. We witness the confusion the children feel as they try to make sense of their mother’s changing behaviour. It captures how living with someone with a mental illness feels a lot like holding your breath, with all the love and fear you have for them.

The book borrows from Jerry Pinto’s own lived experience of being raised by a mother with bipolar disorder. It’s written in an unflinching way while holding both humour and tenderness. As you watch it unfold, you feel like you’re in the room with them, in their universe that nobody other than their family would understand. It is written in the voice of the son who tries to put together who his parents have been, and who they are today. There is a thread of enduring love running through all the loss in their lives. We witness a young couple fall in love in Mumbai in the ’50s and ’60s, and their eventual lives with their children.

One of my favourite lines from the book goes, “When you live in a small house, your lives intersect all the time. There’s no privacy, no way to conceal what is happening. Neither Susan nor I ever stormed off to our rooms and slammed the door and locked the world out, because neither of us had a room. Our lives were contained in a single bedroom and a single living room. There was a kitchen too and a toilet separated from the bathroom—which was an inordinate luxury—and four lives had to be managed within those walls. We had to live and love and deceive within earshot of each other.”

Pick it up for the gorgeous cover, or for this story that I read three years ago and keeps coming back to me. It allows you to step into the shoes of Em, the big Hoom, their son, and their daughter, all at once.

For more amazing recs, also check out 8 Brilliant Books by Indian Authors Set In India, 8 Gorgeous Generational Family Fiction By Asian Authors, and 8 of The Best Mental Health Nonfiction For Teen Readers.

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