Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt and raised in Bombay and New Jersey by Jewish and Jain parents. She writes in three genres and reports for national and international publications. Recent essays are in Southern Humanities Review, The Common, and Longreads. A new essay was shortlisted for the Chatauqua prize and another essay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been nominated to be a 2021 fellow at the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. She was also a New York Public Library fellow and was granted space and time to use their archives to research Partitions in India and in British-mandated Palestine for a novel set in 1946 India. Her poetry collection Forest with Castanets was published by Four Way Books in 2019. Other recent news: poems in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, and a poem commissioned by the NYC Ballet on Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse, She has been an editor at PEN America’s Glossolalia, Guernica, and A Public Space.

In progress is a historical novel set in 1946 Bombay, an essay collection, and a book about reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, or rather, avoiding reading it until middle age.

My essay collection is a systematic and shapely book of old-fashioned probing. The unifying theme is me. While the essays ostensibly relate my experiences, the “me” is merely the bonding element that represents something far more important—I am the moral compass for the reader, and I represent the ways in which an intellectual woman survives in an uncaring world beset by generalized anxiety about the future and lovelessness. The bigger picture is chronic pain, caring for others, immigration, divorce, the aftermath of a childhood blurred by racism, divorce, households with absent parents, single parenthood, learning to swim, disease, and reading. My reactions to the world, in the end, are familiarly human. This broken and jagged memoir of my intellectual education takes place at a time in which we are all feeling broken and jagged and maybe not very intellectual at all.

As an immigrant and mixed-race Jew and Jain, I write about the weirdness of juggling identities in a way that will resonate with readers at a time when so much hinges on who you are and the messy approach you take to the world. I do not follow the standard rules. Maybe these essays were constructed to be a bulwark against loss; exploring the world in associative ways, a stream of consciousness on the surface, yet carefully pinned to the main idea that swings around and tries to get away. I am confrontational, argumentative, meditative, and playful. I believe any subject is fair game, and that pain can be funny. The stories I explore are less about a moment in life, as all lives resemble one another more than they do not, but about the way I approach a topic. I try to be free while peddling a little wisdom. I am entertaining and a little weird at times, but I proceed as if life is in the details and I’d better not miss them.

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