COMING OUT SOLO: A Memoir

Coming Out Solo is about my owning up to my single status, haltingly, over half a decade. And coming to a point where I could finally accept and embrace being solo. It is a journey I feel compelled to share with the world.

I returned to Kolkata in 2017 after a decade of living and working in the Netherlands. It was not just a relocating back to a hometown, but the beginning of a radical new phase in my life: returning home with a small child to live with my recently widowed father, leaving behind a marriage of eighteen years. It also meant starting over in my career from scratch, at 43. My octogenarian father was devastated, but he stood by me.

For the next five years, I would slowly grow into my new skin as a single mother – my new identity never denied but never quite acknowledged either – and eventually ‘come out’ solo after my divorce, owning up to a status that is still judged upon in Indian society. It is a blog I wrote (‘Kolkata Diaries’, KD) during this long transition that helped me evolve in this path, the blog posts themselves morphing into more in-depth personal essays as my confidence to write about my life increased.

Looking back, I find KD can be divided into three distinct phases: the first year – end 2018 to 2019; the pandemic years – 2020 and 2021; and the year life returned to normalcy – 2022. These three phases constitute the three main sections of my memoir.