My life is an open book — is an idiom that acquires its meaning when it stands testimony to all the readers who’d pick up the recently released memoir of author Sreemoyee Piu Kundu, titled Everything Changes.
One wonders how far a public figure can go in laying bare their lives, and Kundu’s work surpasses all possible answers that come to mind. But Kundu stays her usual unabashed self and shares, “I wrote my first book in 2013, and my memoir marks a decade of my writing. I aimed with my first book that I will be original, and I hope after 10 years I have not lost that quality of me and don’t hold back as a person and a writer... I had been wanting to write a memoir in 2018, the year I turned 40, and decided to perform the funeral of my biological father. I had lied about my father, growing up and being bullied in school, from my first job to my first relationship....”
Her writing has almost always been brandished as feminist. But this time, her strong opinions resonate with any woman who faces the politics of living in a man’s world. In addition, Kundu’s palatable writing style unravels the controversial mystery behind her relationships including the one with a married man. “It’s never easy [to write about one’s life] because at the end of the day we live in a very judgmental society. So there’s always that apprehension,” shares the writer, highlighting further: “The spirit of the book is to throw light on survivor families like the one I grew up in where my father died by suicide. I wanted to also bring up topics like intimate partner violence, which I went through in my 20s and was physically and emotionally abused, cheated on and assaulted... To include the chapter about my last relationship was a decision that I took very recently. Earlier the book culminated differently because I wrote it last year when I was in a happy space in the relationship. At the start of this year, I was completely gutted with my mother’s health, my detection of a cyst in my left breast, and all the painful revelations in my relationship. Then looking at myself in the mirror, I asked myself ‘Am I not going to speak my truth?’
{{/usCountry}}Her writing has almost always been brandished as feminist. But this time, her strong opinions resonate with any woman who faces the politics of living in a man’s world. In addition, Kundu’s palatable writing style unravels the controversial mystery behind her relationships including the one with a married man. “It’s never easy [to write about one’s life] because at the end of the day we live in a very judgmental society. So there’s always that apprehension,” shares the writer, highlighting further: “The spirit of the book is to throw light on survivor families like the one I grew up in where my father died by suicide. I wanted to also bring up topics like intimate partner violence, which I went through in my 20s and was physically and emotionally abused, cheated on and assaulted... To include the chapter about my last relationship was a decision that I took very recently. Earlier the book culminated differently because I wrote it last year when I was in a happy space in the relationship. At the start of this year, I was completely gutted with my mother’s health, my detection of a cyst in my left breast, and all the painful revelations in my relationship. Then looking at myself in the mirror, I asked myself ‘Am I not going to speak my truth?’
{{/usCountry}}The answer is in her memoir, which is an apt teaser to the long tale.