Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones

Starred review from January 1, 2024

Mattoo, a cofounder of the women-led podcast network Earios, writes about her journey from a wooden house in the Himalayas to Los Angeles. Forced to flee Kashmir in 1989, Mattoo kept moving for 40 years, living in 32 different places, including Italy, England, and Saudia Arabia, before finally arriving in the U.S. Prepub Alert.

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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.

May 1, 2024
A Kashmir-born, Los Angeles-based writer, filmmaker, and former talent agent reflects on her upbringing between many worlds. "I was born a Hindu in the city of Srinagar, as was almost everyone in my family, for probably thousands of years," writes Mattoo in her debut memoir. She spent idyllic summers and holidays with her extended family there until sectarian violence against Kashmiri Hindus broke out in late 1989. Mattoo's father was a doctor, and the family lived abroad in Saudi Arabia and England the rest of the year, eventually learning that the house they were building in Srinagar was burned down by militants. (The title of the book alludes to a Kashmiri phrase regarding the precious items the family was collecting for the house.) For the author, this early memory constitutes the lingering wound of her rupture with her ethnic past, and she has lived with the desolate feeling of being adrift in the world. The narrative, some of which is emotionally remote, jumps among time periods in Mattoo's life as part of the Indian diaspora, reflecting how she was never sure exactly how to write about her fairly privileged past: "Writing wasn't for people like me, who didn't want to talk about our cultural burdens." She fondly describes her Kashmiri grandparents, businesspeople forced to relocate in Delhi, as well as her love of language and traditional music and food. She also examines her parents' arranged marriage and how she herself had to relinquish an early desire to marry a Kashmiri man because there were so few available in America. Eventually, Mattoo married a Jewish writer. In prose that is warm and sometimes elegant, but not spectacular, the author shares nuggets of hard-won wisdom, but they're not always easy to discern. A moving yet occasionally disjointed personal exploration of the Indian diaspora.

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May 15, 2024
The Kashmir region's nickname might be "Heaven on Earth," but its tragic history, caught as the region is in the geopolitical crosshairs of India and Pakistan, has somewhat muddied that moniker. In her debut memoir, Kashmiri native Mattoo shares the pain of not having a childhood home to return to, and the weighty repercussions of Hindu-Muslim divisions even years later. Eventually, she sheds "tears for a childhood I never got to have, because I was weighed down with the reality of how the world actually worked."" Mattoo's Hindu family set roots in many countries, including in England and Saudi Arabia, and reading about childhood rites of passage through that lens is enjoyably enlightening. Some of the most charming essays in the bunch zero in on family idiosyncrasies, like the author's mom's collection of whimsical single-use kitchen gadgets. Another is open about Mattoo's struggles with depression and winding her way through a career path in Los Angeles. The memoir's title is a translation of a Kashmiri phrase that speaks to the preciousness of rare things easily lost. Mattoo admirably rectifies some of these very losses.

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