Published in 2020
288 pages
Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry: A Memoir and The Sixteenth of June. She has been featured in The Washington Post, In Style, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and was a Finalist for the Audie Awards for best audio book. Winner the 2017 Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction and the 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation-Bread Loaf Scholarship in Fiction, she was a Finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she lives outside of New York City.
What is this book about?
In caring for her aging mother and her own young daughter, writer Maya Shanbhag Lang–”a new voice of the highest caliber” (Rebecca Makkai)–confronts the legacy of family myths and how the stories shared between parents and children reverberate through generations: a deeply moving memoir about immigrants and their native-born children, the complicated love between mothers and daughters, and the discovery of strength.
How much can you judge another woman’s choices? What if that woman is your mother?
Maya Shanbhag Lang grew up idolizing her brilliant mother, an accomplished physician who immigrated to the United States from India and completed her residency, all while raising her children and keeping a traditional Indian home. She had always been a source of support–until Maya became a mother herself. Then, the parent who had once been so capable and attentive turned unavailable and distant. Struggling to understand this abrupt change while raising her own young child, Maya searches for answers and soon learns that her mother is living with Alzheimer’s
When Maya steps in to care for her, she comes to realize that despite their closeness, she never really knew her mother. Were her cherished stories–about life in India, about what it means to be an immigrant, about motherhood itself–even true? Affecting, raw, and poetic, What We Carry is the story of a daughter and her mother, of lies and truths, of receiving and giving care–and how we cannot grow up until we fully understand the people who raised us.
