October 2022: Woman of an Uncertain Age by Priya Malhotra
About the Book.
“With a poet’s sense of lyricism, a painter’s sense of color, and a novelist’s sense of story, Priya Malhotra pushes her language to ever greater heights, teetering at the edge, but always pulling back in time. To me, A Woman of an Uncertain Age is about loneliness and longing, about acceptance and understanding, about the strangeness of existence, especially for Naina, who grew up in India but now lives in New York, all caught in an intoxicating range of metaphors, yet told with an honesty that cuts to the bone.”
"Woman of An Uncertain Age" is a unique "coming-of-age" journey of a middle-aged woman set in the art world of New York City. In the novel, Naina Mehta, a fifty-something Indian immigrant widow with grown children in the United States spurns the traditional image of the aging Indian widow dressed in subdued colors and focused solely on her children and God. After Naina loses her husband, she embarks on a unique and bold journey by moving to New York from New Jersey, falling in love with her daughter's boyfriend, distancing herself from the Indian community, and having a relationship with a Pakistani man, much to her Islamophobic son's chagrin.
Throughout the novel, Naina wrestles with questions like maternal love and moral responsibility versus self-love, and romantic and professional cares versus her own wants. But when she blossoms into a richer version of herself, we see her consciously negotiating the boundaries between selfhood, womanhood and motherhood on her own terms.
About the Author.
Priya has been a writer and journalist in New York for over 20 years and has contributed to publications such as Newsday, Timeout New York, the Times of India, The Japan Times, Asian Art News, Cosmopolitan, and News India Times. She has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a Bachelor's degree in English Literature, and she grew up in New Delhi, India.
Watch Layla’s episode with this month’s author
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