Jerry Pinto

In a one-bedroom-hall-kitchen in Mahim, Bombay, through the last decades of the twentieth century, lived four love-battered Mendeses: mother, father, son and daughter. Between Em, the mother, driven frequently to hospital after her failed suicide attempts, and The Big Hoom, the father, trying to hold things together as best he could, they tried to be a family.

In fiction and in cinema, we see people retreat into the family when they are hurt. There they are surrounded by love and warmth and they can lick their wounds in peace. But what if it is your mother who is wounding you and then soothing you by turns? What if it is your father who seems distant or desolate, living in a dark tower that you cannot enter?... What of the family where someone commits suicide and leaves behind a vacuum, a space that seems to mock every attempt at love and holding on? What of the family which must institutionalize one of its members? How does it manage?’ In 2012, Jerry Pinto published his debut novel, Em and the Big Hoom, which drew upon his experience of living with a mother who was bipolar. It touched thousands of readers, among them many who had similar experiences—of living with someone with a mental illness or infirmity. Some of these readers shared their stories with him and agreed to share them with the world. A Book of Light collects these harrowing yet moving, even empowering, stories—about the terror and majesty of love; the bleakness and unexpected grace of life; the fragility and immense strength of the human mind.