A memoir asks every hard question of the husband — and none of the wife

MISS: Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage was marketed as a cautionary tale for women who outsource their finances to their husbands. If a lawyer and Vanderbilt heiress could be blindsided by her husband of 20 years — father of her three children — what hope did the rest have? A New Yorker exposé argued that her account of financial peril didn’t square with her records.

None of that is why reading Strangers is a waste of a weekend. While admitting to her privilege, Burden cloaks herself in victimhood but her introspection about her own part in the marriage’s collapse is disingenuous at best. She asks every hard question of her husband and none of herself. She paints him as a devoted father who abandoned the children overnight, but never asks how a switch flips that cleanly. Instead, we get a relentless litany of club-room snubs.

Where is the chapter on why she married a man who mirrored her own emotionally unavailable father? She tells you everything about what he did, almost nothing about who she was. It is a neat story of a wronged woman finding herself by the last chapter; it refuses to tangle with the messy bits. Utterly hollow.

-by Aishwarya Khosla

MISS: Grief Burns Like Fever by Minakshi Thakur

Minakshi Thakur’s novel, Grief Burns Like Fever

Minakshi Thakur’s second novel, Grief Burns Like Fever, portrays the second wave of COVID lockdown. Set in Delhi, it follows an ambulance driver who ferries patients, and increasingly, bodies, to an overfilled crematorium.

The premise is attractive, but the writing does little to do it justice. The point of view shifts often — third person to first — leaving you disoriented rather than immersed. In the first-person chapters, a new mother navigates life and a struggling marriage. The first person extends to the husband, switching with no prior indication that it is his mind the reader is delving into. It is then, quite late into the book, that you realise the mother is an unreliable narrator.

With metaphors stacked one after another, Thakur keeps expanding until there’s no room left for the reader’s own interpretation. “It was tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye, untethered laughter and uncontrolled tears trying to defeat each other at any cost,” for instance.

Ultimately, Grief Burns Like Fever has the bones of an important book, but the meat isn’t quite there yet.

-by Reva Thakkar

HIT: Bullet Nani and Other Badass Indian Grandmas by Jasreen Mayal Khanna

Bullet Nani and Other Badass Indian Grandmas by Jasreen Mayal Khanna

Author and journalist, Jasreen Mayal Khanna’s Bullet Nani and Other Badass Indian Grandmas will make you forget everything you know about grandmothers — knit sweaters, cook your favourite meal and dole out unsolicited marriage advice. Through 12 riveting accounts, she introduces feminist grannies who prove that reinvention has no expiry date.

These women are doctors, war-zone medic, scientists, models, entrepreneurs, YouTube creators, IPS officers, and much more. They belong to different regions, communities and class, but are bound by a refusal to let patriarchal expectations script their lives.

Khanna never presents these as larger-than-life figures. They are flawed; even their acts of rebellion can sometimes seem small and ordinary, but transformative nonetheless.

Khanna starts each story with an interesting anecdote, and then takes one back to the beginning of each of their journeys. It is a book about grandmothers, but really, it is about what we owe the women who came before us , and what we can still learn from them.

–by Anusree K C