“We arrived from New York after a daylong slog through airports and planes and traffic. It was 10: 00 p.m. local time, but my body had no idea if it was night or day. Krishna was hungry, so I found ...”

“Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. You shouldve told us, theyd say. We wouldve helped you. Youre not ...”

“I once asked her if she was happy. That depends on what I am able to get done today, she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had contr...”

“But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorces with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized ...”

“Its funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, its largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct...”

“The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentil...”

“The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.”

“The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentil...”

“The insidious reasons for a brown girls self-loathing wont be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with ...”

“Picture your worst fear or most shameful experience becoming associated with an area of your body, and then magnify this image many times over. Within the construct of body dysmorphic disorder, a b...”

“Imagine experiencing pervasive and perpetual sensations of dread and shame, the sort of visceral response that you might have when your body reacts to a physical threat. Envision how distressing it...”

“HOW do you define a word without concrete meaning? To each his own, the saying goes, soWHYpush to attain an ideal state of being that no two random people will agree isWHERE you want to be? Faultle...”

“When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the ...”

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathingthey are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would nev...”