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Prajakta Koli interview on debut novel Too Good To Be True: I know a large chunk of my audience aren’t inherent readers

Feb 05, 2025 06:17 AM IST

In an exclusive interview, Prajakta Koli discusses her maiden novel Too Good To Be True, dearth of romance on screen, and donning multiple hats.

Prajakta Koli is mostly sane, but sometimes, she gets an idea so whacky that she can't help take the leap. The leap from a middle-class Mumbai girl to a viral content creator. The leap from a successful YouTuber to an actor. And now, the leap from an actor to the author of a romance novel. The title of her debut book encapsulates the essence of her very own journey – Too Good To Be True.

Prajakta Koli's debut book is called Too Good To Be True.
Prajakta Koli's debut book is called Too Good To Be True.

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Of books and love at bookstore

The book revolves around Avani, a hopeless romantic, and Aman, a textile tycoon who bumps into her at the bookstore she works at. A very Notting Hill-kind romance – two wildly different worlds colliding and filling each other's cracks between library shelves and vintage bibliosmia. It's not a new world to Prajakta, who has been a ferocious reader for years. Which is exactly why the release of her debut novel feels “reassuring” and “self-validating.”

“I never thought that I would have the guts to write, actually publish, and be okay with putting it out into the world. I've been a creator for almost 10 years now, but this is the most I've bared myself to the audience. Because when you write something, you know that it comes from the nooks and crannies of the author's brain. You find out so many things about them that you wouldn't have through YouTube videos and other stuff that I have done,” Prajakta tells me at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Another equally daunting challenge for Prajakta was to give a fair weightage and voice to both Avani and Aman, since it's a dual POV book. By the time she brought both of them to the page and they took a life of their own, Prajakta had lost her own sense of objectivity. "What does Prajakta want to do, after a while? Because it's the two of them telling me what to do. A lot of times, I'd be writing their dialogues and I'd write something that Aman would say, but there'll be a voice in my head that would say, ‘No, that sounds like Avani.’ So where does Prajakta come in?”

That's exactly why Prajakta had a tough time writing the dedication at the start of the book – how does she even factor in in this story? Is she thirdwheeling? Is she a fly on the wall. Or is she a voice in the head? If yes, then whose head is it? The dedication merely reflects this frustration Prajkata had with her protagonists – “Thank you to the characters in my head for taking me through this process. Next time, write it yourselves.” Prajakta chuckles and sighs as I read out the dedication to her, as if these words came from somewhere else.

Now that Prajakta enjoys some distance from these voices in her head, she realises what she's picked up from both Avani and Aman. “In retrospect, what I learnt from Avani is that it's okay to believe in a good thing if it's staring you in the face and take a chance with it. It's fine. So I like that kind of silver lining about her. What I like about Aman is just the resilience, when you go the whole way for the people you love," she says.

In the epigraph that follows the dedication, Prajakta advises her readers to set their romantic standard so high that every prospective love interest has to bring a ladder to the first date. But she insists to me that contrary to her character Avani, she faced no issues in reconciling her immediate reality with her lofty expectation. She got engaged to longtime boyfriend Vrishank Khanal last year, whom she admits she “kinda fell in love with” the day she met him, at the risk of sounding cliched.

“I remember going back to my friend Radhika and telling her, ‘I’m going to marry this boy.' And she was like, ‘Are you crazy! You’re 18, he's 22. Calm down! See where life goes.' And well, now, 13 years later, that's where my life went,” said Prajakta, adding, “I never really had parameters in my mind. I never imagined I'd want to tick boxes when it came to choosing my life partner. We've grown together and I've kept falling in love with him many times over and over as we got to know each other more.”

The only physical qualities she manifested – and received – in the man she marries are brown eyes and dimples. That's a trait that Vrishank shares with Aman – the man in her book. She compares the colour of Aman's eyes to all the browns she loves – coffee and wooden shelves of bookstores. In the first chapter, she draws a parallel between romance and Mumbai monsoon – how like the rains, love is longed for every year, but ends up as inconvenience more often than not. “I'm not a monsoon fan at all. I think it's inconvenient from the word go, from the first shower," says Prajakta.

Of watchers and readers

Like Avani, Prajakta is also a slave of the ecosystem she's at the centre of. But to consider reducing attention spans as a deterrent to her plans of writing a book never occurred to her. “I don't think there was a voice that said that to me, honestly. See, that's the thing when you don't have too much foresight. I don't think I'm smart enough to think that much ahead," she says, smiling. However, she's cognizant of the fact that not all her audience is going to buy her first book.

“I was worried. I knew that a huge chunk of my organic audience weren't inherently readers. Because a lot of them would write to me when I'd share about my books: ‘Can you tell us something that will help us start reading, or make us make the habit of reading a thing?’ So I was a little bit nervous," Prajakta points out. Hence, she released a companion piece, a music video, Saanvare, to lure her audience into the world and mood of her book.

“I've always found music to be a beautiful medium to get attention. Secondly, as a reader, I rely a lot on music. It's like putting pictures to a book. The minute you add visuals, I feel like I'm part of the story. There's more to it than what's in the pages," says Prajakta. Her desire to write a romance also stems from the dearth of watching enough good romance on screen. “Which is why Mismatched is so special to me. I also feel that's why Mismatched did what it did with the audience. I really do miss romance. Which is why I want to make romance. Lots and lots of it. I'd write and act in it,” she says.

So is she also contemplating developing films and shows now? “I don't know, honestly. None of this was ever planned. We'll cross the bridge when we get there. I'm getting a little worried at how annoyingly calm I am. I think it should hit me anytime now," says Prajata. She attributes her sense of calm to her inability to multitask, instead of her proficiency in the same. “I can't be thinking about the book while I'm on set, prepping for a scene. I can't do that. So I would work on the book only on my day offs, when I'm alone in my room. So they would never spill because I never have the mental bandwidth to be present in two different ideas," she reasons.

Prajakta doesn't miss thanking her team for keeping her ‘mostly sane.’ “My team played a really important role in helping me do that. In general, colour-coding, and everything put on calendar. There has to be colour coding otherwise I can't. That's the only way I can work around this," she says, signing off. Prajakta doesn't know which colour she wants to add to her calendar now. All she knows is that like her character, she won't dismiss something good as too good to be true.

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