![]() ![]() ![]() To honor my family and celebrate my communities. “I wrote the story to choose my own heroes. ![]() “I wrote Dimple Lala’s story to fill that hole in my childhood bookshelf I hadn’t even realized had been there until I was writing,” said Desai Hidier. Until then, the books I had read hadn’t represented my reality, and the messages I received were that my experiences didn’t matter.īorn Confused was the first of its kind-a YA novel about the contemporary South Asian American experience. I felt valued and validated, things I had never felt reading books with white characters. Her exuberant linguistic riffs transfixed me her maximalist prose was loud, lyrical, textural, sensual.įinally-in my 20s!-discovering a book that mirrored my specific hyphenated American experience was life-changing, and I learned how powerful seeing one’s own story reflected in the pages of a book can be. Desai Hidier had written my life-in all its technicolor glory-into the pages of a book: the New Jersey childhood the coming-of-age in New York City’s creative communities, and identifying as South Asian and artist in those spaces the neither-here-nor-there-ness of being an immigrant child. I flipped open the book to read the first chapter and couldn’t stop. I stumbled upon it in the young adult section of Barnes & Noble Union Square that cover-the color, the eyes-caught my attention. Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier hit bookshelves in this moment. ![]()
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