(New Delhi, Jan 7, 2023) On writer-columnist Shobhaa De’s 75th birthday, HarperCollins India Saturday announced the publication of her memoir about the year leading up to this landmark day of hers.
Insatiable: My Hunger for Life is De’s unique take on life and celebrating it, narrated through stories and anecdotes around some of India’s most loved culinary dishes, festivals, traditions and her travels.
The book will release on January 17.
In her candid and inimitable style, De tackles ageing, shares advice with younger women, answers beauty questions, talks about travelling solo, and reveals some of the best kept food secrets of celebrities like M F Husain and Aamir Khan.
According to De, Insatiable is a celebration of life in all its complexities and with all the fault lines; it is about pleasure, joy, loss, the abundance and opulence of possibility.
She says she wrote it “spontaneously in a playful, irreverent mood to chronicle and mark a significant birthday”.
“It’s an authentic, honest and intimate representation of my far-from-conventional life, my deeply invested relationship with people, with food, with the unexpected, with crazy, emotional family celebrations, besides the affectionate recollections of the tumultuous friendships that have enriched and challenged every moment over 75 years,” De says.
Senior commissioning editor at HarperCollins India Trisha Bora describes Insatiable as “light as a well-made souffle, bubbling like a glass of champagne and profound like the days before the monsoon”.
“Shobhaa takes us into her home, to the chatter around her dining table and kitchen, her travels and her engagements with her friends and family,” adds Bora.
“I promise not to be three things – profound, pedantic and pretentious,” says De as she begins her book.
It’s a promise she delivers on in her irreverent memoir.
Quintessential exuberance and keen observations firmly in place, De talks about travelling solo, feasting (and fasting) with family and friends, the triumphs and losses that accompany ageing, the vagaries and vulnerabilities of being a writer and, above all, how food connects people in the most unexpected places and delightful ways.
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