Review: "Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones" by Priyanka Mattoo

Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo
Published June 2024 via Knopf
★★★★

The tap water in my current, grown-up family home is also hard, reminiscent of that summer. I use a built-in water filter most of the time, but if I ever make the lazy mistake of not wanting to walk downstairs, one sip from the wrong faucet takes me right back to the half-finished bathroom in Delhi, its tiny window, a spindly ray of sunlight worming its way through chemical clouds to illuminate one corner of that cursed space. (loc. 2255*)

There's a book that I've been meaning to read for a while, titled Home Keeps Moving—it's about growing up as a third-culture kid. The title seems apt for Mattoo as well: growing up in Kashmir and London and Saudi Arabia and the US, home kept moving. Home was meant to be Kashmir, where her parents were working from a distance to build a home and a life to move back to—but conflict devastated the region and devastated their chances of calling Kashmir home again. So home kept moving.

Mattoo writes early on about thinking that she could not be a writer because that conflict in Kashmir was not the story she wanted to tell: ...I didn't write at all, about anything, for a long time. I didn't know I was allowed. Brown pain, I learned as a small child in Western libraries, was interesting. Brown joy, brown ennui, spunky brown girl detectives—nowhere to be found. So, even though I worshipped books, I thought writing them was for other people. (loc. 234) So this is not a book about that conflict, but rather an exploration, in essays, of a childhood in and between places and an adulthood figuring out how to settle into her skin.

It took me a while to get into this, largely because it's marketed as a memoir and so I was expecting a more...oh, not a more linear narrative necessarily, but I didn't realize until well into the book that I was actually reading a collection of (mostly but not entirely chronological) essays. Still memoir, sure, but memoir-in-essays just requires a slightly different brain space. But with expectations adjusted, it's a beautiful work—Mattoo is so simultaneously unapologetic and wry about herself as a child in particular, describing herself as smart and stubborn and uncompromising in ways that did not always make her life easy. Some of the essays are better fits for me than others (I do tend to prefer those ones about childhood, though the way Mattoo talks about her family pressing her now-husband-then-boyfriend about marriage makes me laugh, because my Indian boyfriend's parents do the same thing on the regular), but they're exacting and with a wonderful sense for story. Well worth the read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.