My Family & Other Saints

Front Cover

Back Cover

Reviews:

My Family and Other Saints is a lovely book about the author's youth in Bombay, India. Her stable family is rattled when the author's older brother announces he's off to seek wisdom from a guru. Their mother's all for it; their father's skeptical. The family home becomes a magnet for truth-seekers, and Narayan is there to affectionately document all of it.

- Body and Soul Magazine

Excerpt:

For families like ours, shaped by migrations across regions and continents, stories are wonderfully portable, carrying weighty histories, places, and people with no excess luggage fees. I sometimes think of such stories as collections of beads. Key family stories are so highly polished through multiple retellings that handing them, we glimpse our own reflections in their facets. Joining the primordial images of early childhood memories, family stories are touchstones that reappear throughout our lives: not just in the performance of retellings, but also in half-glimpsed associations, motivations, anxieties, and dreams. Called on to make sense of ourselves in the world, we sort through these story-beads, choosing, restringing, emphasizing certain ancestors and episodes over others. Retelling these stories, we reshape them too. Though I try to precisely evoke the voices of other family storytellers, my writing inevitably recasts the tales: highlighting some angles, smoothing others.

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