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Neel Patel

Tell Me How To Be

Regular price $39.00 SGD
Regular price Sale price $39.00 SGD
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By Neel Patel

A darkly funny and heartrending Indian American family saga told through the eyes of a gay man not yet out to his family, and his recently-widowed mother who reminisces her first love

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336

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Meanwhile, his mother Renu Amin always seemed perfect: doting husband, beautiful house, healthy sons. But as the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, Renu is binge-watching soap operas and simmering with old resentments. She can’t stop wondering if, thirty-five years ago, she chose the wrong life.

Together, Renu and Akash pack up the house, retreating further into the secrets that stand between them. Renu sends an innocent Facebook message to the man she almost married, sparking an emotional affair that calls into question everything she thought she knew about herself. Akash slips back into bad habits as he confronts his darkest secrets—including what really happened between him and the first boy who broke his heart. When their pasts catch up to them, Renu and Akash must decide between the lives they left behind and the ones they’ve since created, between making each other happy and setting themselves free.

By turns irreverent and tender, filled with the beats of ’90s R&B, Tell Me How to Be is about our earliest betrayals and the cost of reconciliation. But most of all, it is the love story of a mother and son each trying to figure out how to be in the world.

Read if you: promised to call your mom last week and reading this just made you remember.