Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones: A Memoir

Film producer Mattoo reflects on leaving Kashmir during the violent 1980s in her insightful and surprisingly funny debut. After looting and vandalism reduced her childhood home from “the Platonic ideal of a mountain dwelling” to rubble resembling “the world’s most expensive LEGO set,” a nine-year-old Mattoo fled Kashmir with her family. Over the next three decades, she resided in more than 30 different addresses, a peripatetic lifestyle she tracks in freewheeling essays that discuss her obsession with ChapStick trends in Saudi Arabia, her fascination with her newborn baby brother in England, and her difficulty adjusting to American teenage mores in the suburbs of New York. “Life abroad... inevitably chipped away at the pieces I carried of my homeland,” Mattoo writes of the emptiness she felt as her family shuffled between apartments and hotel rooms. But her loving snapshots of relatives and childhood memories preserve what pieces remain, and as the narrative unfolds, acceptance sets in. “I might live with this feeling of hovering between years and places... for the rest of my life,” Mattoo muses in the final pages. “So I suppose I’d better get comfortable with it.” Distinguished by its sharp wit and beating heart, this is a salve for wanderers of all stripes. Agent: Erin Malone, WME. (June)