Do You Know How Lucky You Are?: A Mother-Daughter Memoir

by Rani Neutill

English 1 edition

Writer and professor Rani Neutill’s stable life in the US is upended when she receives an unexpected message-that the mother she’s estranged from is ailing; that she needs to bring her back home from India. Should she risk meeting her—this devastatingly beautiful woman, prone to wild rage and terrifying cruelty-or should she look away? To make a choice, she must confront the story of the life she has shared with her mother—a story that has known hostility and wrath, malice and neglect. Equally, she must come to understand this woman who birthed her. Is the genesis of Rani’s mother’s wrath a grandmother’s frenzy and an aunt’s mania? Or do the ripples stretch further back in time to a colonial past and an ideology that has quashed the possibility of feminist reconciliation? A profoundly moving debut, Do You Know How Lucky You Are? lays bare a relationship where love and wounding are synonymous, and where every act of violence is burdened by the currents of history.