Touching Magic: U-M alum Priyanka Mattoo searches for belonging and understanding in her new memoir, "Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones"
Priyanka Mattoo mines her life in her new memoir, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones. She reflects on not feeling like she belonged or knowing what she wanted to do. Her years at the University of Michigan offered a chance to explore, and she sought answers to the question of what to do even as she entered the workforce with two degrees from U-M. She writes about how she discovered her path forward as she later found a career and a family in Los Angeles. Along the way, she also contemplates music, cooking, family, and parenthood.
The search for belonging and understanding identity follows Mattoo over the years and in her writing. In her memoir, she shares about her family’s inability to make a planned return to Kashmir owing to the insurgency in the late 1980s and early ‘90s and how that change of plans set her life on a different trajectory:
In the spectrum of the diaspora, I fall neither here nor there. I didn’t grow up in India, I present as American, and I don’t exactly relate to either. This can be disorienting enough without the petulant urge to scream, It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to move back to Kashmir. I’ve been lucky enough to have a complex and meaningful life. I wouldn’t change a single twist or turn that landed me the partner, the kids, the job I enjoy now. But even if we hadn’t stayed in Srinagar, even if I had eventually left to pursue other opportunities, I still carry an anger and sorrow about having the choice taken away.
This lens affects how she viewed places going forward. When she later has her own family, it became clear how her past informs her relationship to geography and belonging:
It’s a sense of belonging to a place that, no matter how much we travel, makes my husband mention how hard it would be to live in another country, because that would be “too far away.” “Too far away from what?” I ask him. Every country exists within itself.
To Mattoo, the culture, outlook, and size of the U.S. are surprising, despite the author having grown up around the world:
What a crazy place America is, where you can drive for three days straight and everyone’s still speaking English, and all were seemingly raised on the same episodes of eighties television. But they’ll tell me, in a lather, that the barbecue is dry here, whereas in another place it’s more …wet. I stare blankly, feeling like an alien that’s landed on a well-meaning planet, one that believes that it is the beating heart of the universe.
The author is open about her experiences and how they informed her thinking throughout her memoir.
Mattoo’s book covers her time in Ann Arbor, the first mention describing her memory of “…dragging a garbage bag full of clothes from a decrepit house to a more decrepit house as a student in Ann Arbor.” She writes about dinner parties hosted in Ann Arbor apartments. Perhaps less tangibly, Mattoo reflects on how her journey as a student at the University of Michigan was the start of an indirect journey to figure out her passions and how to pursue them. When her initial pre-med track proved to be a poor fit, she found a warm home in the Italian department. Her chance to study abroad in Tuscany provided her with a “feeling it had evoked” that she wanted to carry forward in her quest for “things that fed instead of depleted me.”
Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones spans her life—from childhood to the present day—when Mattoo has inched towards her dream of writing by finally publishing a book. After an unhappy start as a talent agent, she moved on to developing scripts for TV and films at a production company. As she spent time reflecting on what direction to go from there, she writes, “…my husband steered me into listing five people whose careers I admired. That was easy. ‘They’re all writers,’ he said.” This insight led to Mattoo’s new memoir.
Mattoo and I talked about this decision to write a memoir, the contents of her book, and what’s next ahead of a July 23 appearance at Literati Bookstore.
Q: You write about your time at the University of Michigan in your new book, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones. What did you like about living in Ann Arbor?
A: What’s not to love about Ann Arbor? It’s the perfect size city, for one. Robust, but not overwhelming. The University is such a magnet for culture, intellectuals, and all kinds of weirdos. The food is good, the vibes are great. People read! They love art! They’re funny and mostly reasonable! I would move back in a heartbeat.
Q: Your background includes screenwriting. How did your approach to writing shift when you switched from producing content for shows to authoring a book?
A: In screenwriting, I get to make stuff up, even if it’s rooted in my actual life, which it usually is, and while it obviously takes some introspection to get the emotional beats of a screenplay right, the book required some deep digging I wasn’t exactly ready for. But this is now the place I live, deep in my feelings, and everyone else’s, in a land of no small talk. I kind of love it.
Q: Your new book is a memoir, and you write conversationally. How did you decide on this genre and style?
A: Oh that’s such a funny question, I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of my tone as conversational. I usually just shrug and say it’s direct. But so is my conversational style, so you’ve got me there. I didn’t write for a long time, because I was doing other things. But I’ve always told versions of many of these stories out loud, so when it came time to commit them to paper, I suppose it makes sense that my writing voice wouldn’t feel right until it matched my speaking voice. When my husband read the book, he said it was like hanging out with me, and while I hadn’t defined that as the goal, I realized it absolutely was. That effect is concentrated even further in the audiobook, which I read—although I guess that’s like a nine-hour, one-way conversation. When I hear people listened to the audiobook I always feel bad for not being able to ask them questions back!
Q: One passage in your book covers your decision to try writing a book and the intimidation that it causes because you love books so much. You write, “Could I attempt magic? Reading brought me such transcendent joy, who was I to think I might bring that same joy to other people? It seemed insane, at the time, like deciding to be God. I just couldn’t.” What is your outlook now that you are on the other side of writing a book?
A: Oh, I’m 100 percent just in disbelief still. I wonder if mountain climbers feel this way because it felt like I just took one hesitant step at a time, but after I put all those steps together, I looked back and I’d summited a peak. I still love and worship books, I’m at the library every week. I have a teetering stack next to my bed—books are my first love and my constant companion. I can’t believe I wrote one of my own. Maybe someday I will be very chill and casual and take it for granted, but I don’t think so. It took me 44 years to get here, and I will really believe I get to touch magic for the rest of my career.
Q: Relatedly, I appreciated your insights about figuring out what you wanted to do over time, which extends over several chapters. You write about studying abroad while you were at the University of Michigan and how you enjoyed “pursuing simple pleasures, connecting with people and things that fed instead of depleted me.” This was not an easy journey to reach a spot where you enjoy what you do. What did you learn from articulating this journey in the book?
A: I understood how important it is to come back to that as a foundational need: enjoyment instead of achievement and/or utility. I had been programmed from birth to achieve and to be useful. But it wasn’t until I was a late teen that I understood my engine was going to run out of gas if I didn’t also learn to enjoy myself in a real way. And I still fall into this pattern! The go, go, go starts to grind and I stop and reset—am I enjoying myself enough, and how can I? It resets the balance and points me in the right direction when I’m unsure.
Q: Another aspect of the book is exploring your first home of Kashmir and subsequently all of the places where you have lived. Later in the book, you write about finding Los Angeles as home. Do you believe that happiness is tied to place? Why or why not?
A: I don’t believe happiness is a place, because I would have found it by now. I believe happiness is relational—with your family, your friends, your community, your work. I joke that the reason I’m mostly so happy is because I’m always a little bit disgruntled. When something feels off, I need to address it. A wonky conversation with a friend, a job, whatever. I need to figure out why I’m not happy, process it, and either make a change or make my peace.
Q: Throughout the book, your stories intersect with religion, racism, colonialism, and other issues, both through the history of the countries where you have lived and your personal experiences. One example is when you found racist anthropological accounts of the Kashmiri people in books about the region. Another example is the participation of the U.S. in wars. What role(s) might literature fill to move us forward from these issues?
A: I could spend hours on this one question. I guess the most efficient answer is that nobody ever changed my mind or illuminated it by yelling at me. All I can do is lay out a history of my own loved ones, and let people connect it to their own humanity. My story is obviously so different from so many of the people reading the book, but I hope we can constantly remind each other that we have more in common than not. And that American citizens have benefited and been protected from U.S. foreign policy moves that have been catastrophic to other countries and communities. And many Americans are only just starting to see the scope.
Q: As we wrap up, I hesitate to ask this question because it is an obvious one, but the book’s title is beautiful, so I would like to talk about it. You write about the phrase that lends itself to the book’s title in the first essay. Tell us how you decided on this title.
A: When I sold the book, it was called Sixteen Kitchens, and meant to be a light-hearted series of essays about food and family. But it became so much more than that by the end, so I handed it in without a title and took some long stompy walks until I realized I needed the title to be a Kashmiri phrase, although I didn’t know which one. I wanted it to be a real punch in the face—in a good way, I mean. I spoke to family members and pored through old books of colloquial expressions until I hit on this perfect one—chaari daud the mahe adij—bird milk and mosquito bones, referencing objects so rare and precious the listener should question their existence. It made me think of the objects we carried to the house we built in Kashmir. Was it all as beautiful as I remember? Does it even matter? I think it all makes sense when you read the book.
Q: What is on your stack to read?
A: I’m reading and loving Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise. Next up is Woman of Interest by Tracy O’Neill, and then I just received a galley from my friend Nayantara Roy, whose debut novel The Magnificent Ruins will be out in November.
Q: What is next for your writing?
A: I’m writing a detective pilot for CBS and a feature adaptation of my short film The Homestay. I also sold a second book to Knopf right after I turned in this one. That’s also a book of essays, but firmly rooted in the present. It’s about reconnecting with joy and pleasure without blowing up my life. We’ve had these incredible memoirs of women reaching a certain point in their lives and then setting fire to them, a genre I love and applaud, but I have no major complaints about my own life. I’ve just fallen into patterns, servicing my work and my children—as so many of us do—and, as I’ve mentioned, I am trying to figure out how to squeeze more happiness out of every single day, especially in this political climate.
Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.
Priyanka Mattoo will be in conversation about her new book with Lillian Li at Literati Bookstore, 124 E. Washington St. in Ann Arbor, on July 23 at 6:30 p.m.