Missed Translations

Starred review from April 1, 2020

Deb is a comedian, reporter for the New York Times, and formerly estranged son with a hilarious reckoning to share. His memoir centers on the Bengali immigrant parents who raised him in New Jersey. After coming to the U.S., Deb's father returns to India, leaving his mother and son behind. With Deb's father gone, he and his mother begin to drift apart. The memoir follows Deb as he seeks to build new relationships with his parents after growing up proudly Hindi, briefly idolizing whiteness, and, later, embracing his Bengali heritage again. Along the way, readers get insight into his stand-up career, forays into talk therapy, dating life, and experiences covering the 2016 election as a reporter of color. The book moves quickly through time and space, but Deb's comic genius and strong heart ground the narrative. His writing style is plain, confessional, and filled with laugh-out-loud passages about everything from memories of his childhood to learning to accept his insecurities as an adult. Perhaps most impressive of all, Deb addresses firsthand experiences of ignorant racism with wise humor. VERDICT A delightful memoir of people and place that will draw in Deb's fans and attract plenty of new ones.--Sierra Dickey, Ctr. for New Americans, Northampton, MA

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2020
New York Times culture and sports writer and comedian Deb goes on an emotional and physical journey to discover why his family has drifted so far apart. As Deb neared 30, his parents served mostly as a punch line for his stand-up routines; tired tropes about Indian parents. In reality, Deb hadn't seen his parents in years and his childhood was far from stereotypical. His parents' arranged marriage was disastrous, his mother often locking herself in her room for long periods of time (likely suffering from undiagnosed depression). His father moved to India without telling anyone shortly after they divorced. Traveling to India for a wedding gives Deb the excuse he needs to reconnect with his father, while a random Mother's Day spurs him to call his mother for the first time in years. He takes a journalistic approach to interviewing them and discovers lives filled with difficulties and long-buried secrets. While his topic is serious, Deb's writing is breezy and witty, and his earnestness will sweep readers up into this charmer of a memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2020
A New York Times reporter and stand-up comedian travels to India, looking for clues to his immigrant parents' lives, and finds lighter moments amid dark family secrets.Growing up Hindu in suburban New Jersey, debut author Deb learned that Indian weddings were multiday events, "a slightly tamer version of Burning Man." When his best friend decided to get married in India, the author decided to make his first visit to the country to which his father had returned after his parents' divorce. Deb hoped to find answers to long-simmering questions: Why was his mother so unhappy? What made his parents' arranged marriage a disaster when an aunt and uncle's had thrived? Why had his father abruptly gone back to India, without explaining why? Accompanied by his American girlfriend, Deb embarked on a five-city tour that began at his father's flat in a neighborhood he calls "the Brooklyn of Kolkata." Over the next three weeks, as he visited relatives and monuments, skeletons tumbled out of a family closet that the author breezily inventories. He chronicles his years as a "self-loathing Bengali child" in largely white suburbs, his discovery that stand-up comedy could be "cathartic," and his former work as a CBS News reporter covering the Trump campaign. In the foreword, Hasan Minhaj rightly says that Deb "goes well beyond the typical, 'Hey, my parents wanted me to get straight A's' model minority narrative." As the author discusses his travel from Kolkata to Agra and beyond, the book often resembles a rougher-around-the-edges version of a Bill Bryson travelogue, featuring a wisecracking tone that sometimes turns sophomoric. (Deb's first reaction to the Taj Mahal: "Holy shit. It's right there. Holy shit. It's right there. IT'S RIGHT THERE.") Memoirs by children of immigrants often fault clueless parents; this one is refreshing for Deb's realization that--whatever his elders' missteps--he needed "to take some responsibility for my part in our family's disconnect" for things to change. A sympathetic portrait of South Asians who are neither crazy and rich nor humorless nerds.

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