Nepal, Feb. 14 -- It's cold, but inside one of South Kolkata's cafes, almost 30 people are seated at a book event. One of them asks Rani Neutill what her mother would say if she read her memoir. Rani says it was her mother who asked her to write about her in the first place. There are laughs, and some people nod in the acknowledgement that mothers are known to do such things.

Rani Neutill's mother wasn't the best of mothers-Rani knows this, her mother knew this, and any reader of her memoir Do You Know How Lucky You Are? knows this in the span of the first few pages. And yet, in the grand tradition of books written by children of their mothers, Rani defends, cajoles on behalf of, diagnoses, contextualises and finds a way to justify the e...