THEY CALLED US EXCEPTIONAL

A fraught memoir of life in a psychically tangled Indian American household riven by ambition and discontent.

Gupta, a former senior reporter at Jezebel who had the distinction of incurring Donald Trump’s wrath thanks to a probing interview she did with a defensive, elusive Ivanka, grew up as one of “the new model minority”: immigrants from India who are highly educated, wealthy, and endlessly hardworking. That success, she holds, is a result of a “thrice-filtered and stratified” selection process whereby the most privileged in India leave for better opportunities abroad. The author’s father moved from India to Canada to the U.S. following an arranged marriage, and there he began a successful career in medicine. Alternately emotionally distant and full of self-doubt, he often demeaned Gupta’s mother, a modern example of “how women’s voices…were appropriated by both the British colonizers and Indian men in power during the struggle for control.” Addressing much of her narrative to her mother in the second person, Gupta recounts the pressures of being brought up with aspirational expectations of perfection that she came to resist, if mostly innocently: “Papa cast my rebellion as typical American teen behavior. But, Mummy, real rebels would have laughed at me.” The friction among parents and daughter grows ever more grinding as the memoir proceeds into young adulthood, yielding both tragedy and a rupture within a seemingly ironclad nuclear South Asian family. Gupta does not often become overwrought, though there are moments. More notable is her difficulty in understanding the motives of her driven father and a mother of whom, she admits in direct address, “I never asked you what hopes and dreams buoyed you amid the all-consuming loneliness and grief of leaving your family and your country behind. I had just assumed that the West, the land of oppor­tunity, was so obviously the best place to live.”

In relentlessly grim, unsparing prose, Gupta offers proof of Tolstoy’s observation that each unhappy family is uniquely so.