As a journalist, Sopan Deb covers basketball and culture for the New York Times. As a comedian, he contends with his family’s culture: his experience growing up Hindu in New Jersey, being the second son of Indian immigrants who divorced and drifted apart, and living with their estrangement in adulthood.

Deb’s compassionate and candid debut memoir, Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me (Dey Street, April 21), chronicles journeys to India and beyond—to reconnect with his parents and have the tough conversations they’d held in abeyance for many years.

From our review: “Deb hoped to find answers to long-simmering questions: Why was his mother so unhappy? What made his parents’ arranged marriage a disaster when an aunt and uncle’s had thrived? Why had his father abruptly gone back to India, without explaining why? …. In the foreword, Hasan Minhaj rightly says that Deb ‘goes well beyond the typical, “Hey, my parents wanted me to get straight A’s” model minority narrative’…. A sympathetic portrait of South Asians who are neither crazy and rich nor humorless nerds.”

In this video interview, Deb discusses jokes, journalism, Bengali culture, and his father’s response to his questions about their family.