“Moments that change your life are often unremarkable. One minute everything is fine—you are having dinner, you are watching television, you’re walking in your carefully cultivated garden, and the next minute it has all gone wrong,” writes Manjiri Indurkar in her memoir, It’s All In Your Head, M. In her case, that moment came during a dare in her hometown of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh – a dare issued by a twenty-year-old man to a small child. Young, frightened and confused (attributes her assailant counted on), she stayed quiet about the abuse for years. But a decade into adulthood, she is ready to speak of it, analyse it, and place it firmly in the past.
Indurkar’s memoir is a candid account of an unexpected reckoning with her past that she had in her twenties. When she struggled to recover emotionally and physically from a bout of severe illness, Indurkar was forced to return home and contend with mental illness and the trauma festering deep inside her. Armed with poetry, therapy and family and friends, she wrote the truth down—first in poems, then in essays, and finally, in a memoir whose architecture asks more of her than she has ever shared before.
She spoke to HuffPost India about the difficulty of writing this memoir while suffering from mental illness, the need for boundaries with one’s editors and one’s readers, the task of telling her family the truth, and the lack of regret she feels about turning her story over to the public, challenging as it is. Edited excerpts:
If you could go back to the beginning of the writing process, would you do anything differently? Is there something you wish you had known when you were starting out?
I would have spent time formulating a stronger structure for the book. I was nervous about changing things that I had initially imagined, but you know those things never stick. I tried my best to stay “on course.” Because of my anxiety, I am rigid about following a plan. Once I had done the chapterisation, I was too scared to touch it, to move things around. I kept hearing a voice in my head asking me to just follow the plan. And it scared me. I was juggling so many fears—of writing a bad book, an unreadable book, a book everyone will scoff at, a book that will hurt so many people, a book that can ruin my life—that it felt like too much stress to change anything already written on paper. Like I had signed a contract with myself and the clause was to not change a thing. I wish I had known that things were going to change anyway. I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t know this already, but to what extent, I wasn’t ready for that.
You mentioned that the writing of the book challenged your idea of yourself as a person willing to talk about everything, that you discovered to your surprise that you were unwilling to share some aspects of your story with the reader. Could you tell me a little about this?
Writing about my child sexual abuse experience was a tall task. I tried to write as much as I could, but there were other things, other people, I just could not write about—I risked hurting people I wasn’t ready to hurt. I felt like my emotions were too raw, the hurt ran too deep, I hadn’t found a stable ground for my emotions, and I was dead-set on not writing anything that I hadn’t thought through, and understood. So I have used poems to leave trails for those particular instances, instead of writing about them directly, so if someone reads the poems closely, they might get an idea about what I am trying to hide, and yet say.
Then, there were very private moments that I’ve had with former lovers, or friends. Those moments of intimacy weren’t things I was willing to share with the world, and it wasn’t something I understood before I got down to writing them. I didn’t know how guarded I felt about my loved ones till the time came to write about them. I used to think I am such an open person, writing about everything—from my loneliness, to my mental health, to my CSA experiences. But I don’t think I was imagining the micro details, the reflections till the time came to first spell them out for myself and then for the hypothetical reader. There are certain things that we have to save for ourselves too.
“I always have believed that once your work is out in the world, it isn’t yours, but belongs to the reader.”
I often feel like readers of memoirs (ourselves included) feel entitled to an unlimited access to the details of the memoirist’s life. There’s a substantial personal cost to be paid while writing a book like this. When you first signed on to write the memoir, did you anticipate that?
My first thought when I was asked to write this memoir was that I have lived such a banal life. Sure, there is this one tragedy that happened to me when I was little but really, who would want to read about this girl who grew up in Jabalpur, an obscure little city no one really cares about? I was worried about boring the reader. Then when I started writing it I felt more and more protective about my life. Striking a balance between how much to tell, how much to keep for myself was a constant struggle. Whenever we read a memoir we assume we know the writer. I understand the desire to feel that familiarity in the writer, to find common ground, to feel like you have a companion. In some sense, the purpose of writing such a book is to be able to speak to readers and become their companion. But we are more than the narratively stitched incidences we are reflecting on. A memoir is just one part of our life.
However, this worry that people would just reduce my life to some of the things that happened to me and feel sorry for me, or see me in a certain way, always was there. It is why I was so bent on writing this book in a way that no one feels bad for me. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with that. But now that the book is out, and some people have read it, I am slowly learning what I don’t think was possible to learn while I was still in the process. Which is to let go. I have to constantly remind myself that I cannot control what people think, how they read the book and see me, choose to love me or hate me. I can’t control that and I can’t let that form or deform the opinion I have of myself. I always have believed that once your work is out in the world, it isn’t yours, but belongs to the reader. Like the little hypocrite I am, I am struggling with this act of letting the reader own the book, letting the reader think of me the way they want to. It is stressful, all the time it makes me anxious, has given me a few panic attacks. But I am not sorry I wrote this book, even if it comes at a substantial personal cost.
What books shaped or soothed you or you writing during this time?
Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal and Roxane Gay’s Hunger. Both women were a reminder that my story counts—like an instruction manual that told me to take forward this tradition of women telling their stories to inspire other women to do the same.
Winterson’s book was a warm hand to hold in times of distress. Telling me constantly that there is no other option than moving forward. Despite all odds, there are things to be done, a world to be changed for oneself. The bravery of that book, the sheer necessity of that book taught me about the necessity of my book.
Roxane Gay taught me that I need not be afraid of the rawness of my emotions, to tell the world that I have suffered, but I am not broken. She just rips open every wound and invites us, her spectators to witness her pain, and be a part of it. It is very affirming too, because we know this woman has seen a lot, been through a lot, and yet here she is, telling us her story. I think Gay was telling me that writing this story and finishing this book is the biggest success I am going to get. Whatever else that follows or doesn’t follow then is just a bonus.
The memoir is structured as a series of sections which are further divided into chapters. How did you go about putting together the overarching structure for the book?
When I started thinking about this book, this is the way I envisioned it. The idea behind breaking the book into parts was to provide the reader with some breathing space. That you don’t have to read continuously, you can take a break, pause before you move to the next season of my life. I was also certain I was not going to opt for a linear narrative because the book is not following my life as much as it is following my consciousness, my awakening. So it starts from the moment when my life began to change, when things started happening rather than the moment of my birth. The narrative structure is the way I understand my life. In a way it is no literary device, just my life and my understanding of it.
I really resonated with the way you linked cinematic and literary influences in the memoir with our skewed expectations of romantic love. I know Bollywood has had an immense cultural impact on you. Can you talk to me about how it has shaped your mental health, in both good and bad ways?
We are all well aware of the horrible things Bollywood has taught us, the insecurities it instilled in us. From body image issues to these narratives of strength and how it is defined, its ignorance of issues, the sexism and patriarchal values have all impacted us in many ways that have been detrimental to my mental health. The most important of them all, of course, has been the body hatred that Bollywood helped push further with its constant mockery of fat bodies and how they are unworthy of any love or respect. That really did make me hate myself. “Who are you, trying to wear the sharara Kareena Kapoor wore in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham?” “Have you even seen yourself in the mirror?” These things that I’d say to myself, the voices I’d hear in my head, and the voices of the people around me who often mocked me were thanks to Bollywood.
But I can never bring myself to hate Bollywood. In fact, I love it. At the heart of every film that was made, were these stories of the victory of good over bad—the underdog winning, the poor man beating the rich, lovers eloping and causing rebellion, all these stories ultimately were stories of hope and vindication.
I lived in a small town and Bollywood was my window to the outside world. I didn’t know what big city folks were wearing, eating, doing, and I would not have had it not been for Bollywood. I have bought clothes because Madhuri Dixit or Rani Mukherjee made something popular. It helped me assemble a personality for myself. In its music I found a vent. I could just lock myself and cry loudly singing a particular song. I could feel giddy in love and sing Aaj Kal Paon Zameen Par. Bollywood was a constant source of joy, of dream-making, of escape for me. Bollywood taught me to hope for love. We can complicate all these desires, and we should, but before the intellect, before an understanding of the problems we now know and associate with popular culture, came love. The kind of hope and love and meaning it brought into my life. To date whenever I am feeling hopeless, I turn to something old Bollywood and it helps. It is an essential escape in my life.
“I had to constantly remind myself this is my story, I am not answerable to anyone here, I have to write my truth. My experience is going to be different from the other person’s experience.”
In some ways, mental illness may appear an easier subject to write about than sexual abuse. I know I guard some stories rather than others from the world. Was one more difficult to write about than the other?
The two obviously intersect and I couldn’t have written one without the other, but writing about my child sexual abuse was more difficult because this time I wasn’t just allowed to gloss over the details like I have in the past. This time I had to tell stories, build a narrative, introduce characters, write them in a way that they don’t come across as two-dimensional. I had to get into some gory details. And while these are things I have been thinking about all my life, have talked to close friends about, and have analysed and overanalysed, writing about them with the thought that people who don’t know, those I love and therefore have shielded this side of myself from, will read about it and suffer made the process impossibly hard. There were so many days I actually thought about giving up. I had to keep reminding myself that I owed it to myself, I had to finish writing this, that it was better to live openly than the way I have been living. It was the difficult but essential thing to do. Writing about mental health in some ways was a tad easier because I talk about it all the time, and I’m so open with anyone who will listen. It’s the more accessible side of my life. This wasn’t that. This was the part I had to pull right out of my gut and let it take the shape it wants to.
Were there sections of the memoir that were relatively easier to write? Why do you think that is?
Two bits in particular were easy to write. One is the ‘Aaji’ bit. I have been trying to justify my Aaji’s actions to myself for years. I was angry and curious and the curiosity had sent me on a journey looking for answers. I have been doing that for over a decade. I really had all the answers ready, it was just a matter of writing it all down, and once I started, it just flowed.
The second was the good bits of the relationship with Avi. I knew it was going to be hard to write the bad part. Harder than the stories of child sexual abuse, because I am still in a way processing all that brought about the fall of the relationship. But the good bits, I was eager to remember, and eager to write. It was a good time of my life, and I had to document it.
As you wrote, were you worried about the reactions of people you were writing about or the impact on them? What challenges did that throw up? How did you navigate your way through that?
Yes, and I still am. It is still early days. There are people who were informed that I will be including them in my book, I asked them if it is okay for me to use their names, I could change them, not mention identifying details—the usual rules that you learn when you start writing such a book. Then there were those I could not have informed because they aren’t in my life anymore, or they are the so-called villains of the story. But the fear wasn’t just about these people reading and forming their opinions, feeling cheated, or angry, but also about the people close to these people I am writing about and how their feelings would be hurt. I had to constantly remind myself this is my story, I am not answerable to anyone here, I have to write my truth. My experience is going to be different from the other person’s experience. I have discussed this with my therapist in such detail I am sure she is bored of it by now. The last time we spoke about it she asked me what I will be saying to someone who comes and objects to a particular bit that involves them. I thought about it and said that I think I will tell them to write their own book to tell their side of the story. I am sticking to that. I am only responsible for my experiences, and I will tell the story the way it happened to me.