Flying Right up to the Sun

PRIYANKA MATTOO and I met as part of a group of writers with books coming out in 2024. Her debut essay collection, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, is deeply moving, sharply funny, and delightfully prickly. At its center is the loss of a homeland—an ache that radiates through each of the volume’s essays. When Mattoo was little, her ancestral home in Kashmir burned down. Her family was unable to return, and Mattoo grew up in London and Saudi Arabia before moving to the United States as a teenager. Though she has lived here since, she explains that her “Americanness has always felt like a costume.” Her essays conjure details of Himalayan life—like the time she accidentally hit a bat while playing badminton—with the kind of exquisite attention suggested by the collection’s title. Yet her descriptions of Los Angeles living exhibit a similarly heightened quality: she remembers how in her first apartment, for example, mice would nibble the food out of her pockets at night.

Mattoo isn’t interested in bland, dishwater “niceness,” which she views as the “weakest” of compliments. The women in her family have “no patience for wallflowers or fools.” Sorting through the different cultural scripts given to her, Mattoo has found her own way of being a woman in the world. Her book brims with older-daughter immigrant energy and, though I’m not a crier, I teared up over and over.

Mattoo is as smart, warm, and entertaining in person as she is on the page. In June, the two of us connected over Zoom to talk about Americanness, her relationship to place (namely Los Angeles), and reckoning with ancestral trauma.

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KATYA APEKINA: When people ask you where you’re from, what’s your answer?

PRIYANKA MATTOO: I tell people I’m from Michigan, usually—that’s my knee-jerk. And, if I feel like we’re going to be spending a little time together, I sigh, take a deep breath and vaguely go, “All over,” because I generally recoil from the conversation. That’s why I wrote the book; maybe I can just hand it out when people ask.

Why do you recoil?

It feels so complicated—I don’t really know how to unpack it for people. It’s like a decision chart, right? If I say that I’m from Kashmir and people know what Kashmir is, I immediately get a pity stare. If they don’t know what it is, I have to explain. And then it becomes a convoluted and sad conversation. So in general, I just try to gloss over it. I think I’ve spent 20 years not really talking much about my background because I didn’t want to. It was nice to hide in the smooth-brain Hollywood life. Then that stuff catches up. Not addressing your past catches up.

You have this line that I loved: “[M]ost people’s insides feel connected to a place, and mine, though healing now, don’t.” This is something I feel too. What do you think it does to a person to not be connected to a place in that primal way?

There are benefits. I’m pretty portable. You can take me anywhere, in any situation, and I’ll drop right in: I’ll make friends and I’ll know what to talk about. I’ll find a supermarket, I’ll find things to do, I’ll find where to eat. So, in some sense, I belong everywhere, but then there’s a feeling—which is kind of hard to describe—of never truly feeling rooted, even though I’ve lived in L.A. for 20 years. I’ve lived in the United States for over 30 years, and I still don’t feel like it’s home. I don’t think I ever will.

When I think back to Kashmir and the time I spent there, I remember what it feels like to be in a place where I belonged—surrounded by family and friends and people like me, speaking my language, drowning in my own culture, embracing and enjoying and loving that culture. It was a very brief period of my life, and I won’t ever feel that again, even if I go back, because it’s transformed. The recent history has been so complicated that I can’t imagine feeling comfortable there … I can’t imagine feeling anything but sad, even though it’s safe to travel there now.

Do you feel like there’s something particularly temporary-feeling about L.A. that makes it harder to feel connected to it?

There are so many things I love about L.A. Los Angeles is such a blank slate. It is whatever you fill it with. There are so many ways to live in L.A. I was driving to a friend’s house in the Hills the other day and I was like, oh, this is just a completely different experience from my life in Venice. I’ve lived three, even four lives in L.A.

There is that transience. There are a lot of transplants; a lot of people move in and out of Los Angeles. But I’m raising my kids here, and I see what their life is here and how it feels for them to be Californian, and that is very moving to me. I think they feel a profound connection to this place. Whenever we get out of the car—wherever we are—my son, who’s 10, will turn around and be like, “Ocean’s that way.” And I’m like, “How do you know?” And he’s like, “I just … I just … I’m connected to it.” He doesn’t even have the words—he goes, “I’m just connected to it.” It doesn’t matter where we are. It’s so cool.

So, whenever I get disgruntled about being here, I look at my kids and I’m like, “You guys are living very full lives, and if that’s my purpose here, then so be it.”

Your description of your early years in Los Angeles reminded me of my early years in New York—squalid in a way that felt almost bohemian.

I didn’t mind it. I had no problem being poor. I had the library. I had the bus. You know? Probably like you. I felt a certain sense of pride in getting by on my own. But yeah, I was really broke. It was not a glamorous time, but I did enjoy it. I also had kind people around me and I had people who took care of me. My boss took great care of me. I was very lucky to find her. I mean, I moved out with like $300, a pantsuit, and a broken windshield.

I remember when I was an assistant, my first day on the job, I had to take a jacket back to Barneys over lunch and my boss was like, “Don’t look at the price tag.” And I remember looking at the price tag and it was like $1,400. I was surrounded by a shocking amount of money. Clients would just get random million-dollar checks in the mail for just being nice. I remember leaving a giant check in my desk once over the weekend because I didn’t want to process it, and then my boss had to be like, “You understand interest, right? Like when we get the check it has to go in the bank because: interest.” And I was like, oh my god. The interest on a million-dollar check! I’m an idiot. So much money.

You say your Americanness has always felt like a costume. You had to learn to temper your intensity—and then there’s the idea of “niceness,” which you grew up thinking of as a very weak virtue. I found this very relatable: learning to seem “normal” around Americans involved muting myself.

Yes, yes, I think the first impression setting is like a simmer, you know, where you kind of have to go on and test the waters, but the beautiful thing about becoming a writer is that I’ve found so many more of my people and I can sift through a crowd and find the people who aren’t interested in small talk, the people who will go right under the hood with me. And those are my people, writers and creatives. People who I can roll up my sleeves with right away.

That said, there are so many things I love about being, technically, American. I think the thing I appreciate the most, and the reason that I am raising the kids here, is that there’s a mindset that I treasure, a sense of openness and the feeling, even if it’s rooted in delusion, that anything is possible. As long as kids are given the means, which so many kids in this country are not. But they have big imaginations and big dreams and friendly hearts, and they’ll talk to anybody. I used to find it so off-putting, when we lived in other countries, that Americans were always yapping, and now I see it in my own kids and myself—I’ll talk to anyone—as such a nice propensity for human connection.

When do you think that shift happened for you, when you started thinking of yourself as an American?

I still don’t. I think of myself as technically American. I became a citizen when I was 25. And that was for travel purposes. But maybe with the kids, it became a little more obvious that I had taken on a fair amount of Americanness. And it was when I started to realize that I don’t think I would raise them anywhere else. That was the tell: my desire to raise them here.

You write in the book about being a teenager in Michigan and New York, and the painful separation you felt from your parents, who were pretty overprotective. And that separation took on more weight because your family was from a different culture. You say that your happiness was at odds with your parents’ happiness. Which seems further magnified because the rejection of your parents’ rules also became a rejection of your ancestral culture. I found it so moving—the way you wrote about the tension between the desire to be seen and the desire to be accepted.

I love my family so much and I’ve always liked my parents, which I don’t think everyone can say. I thought they were interesting—I’m not going to say “cool,” but I thought they were great company. So, when the rifts started to happen, which obviously do for many people in their teens, it was really difficult for me to reconcile the coziness and closeness that we had with the growing understanding that my life would look very different from what they expected it to be.

I felt so deeply that I was right. I had a whole life outside of the house. I had my school life, and I had all this feedback from other people that they didn’t have, all these data points that they didn’t have. And I think when they moved, they were very scared. They moved to this big crazy country that was full of guns. My dad was working in an ER, and he saw a bunch of pregnant teenagers all the time. They were just so anxious that they couldn’t see what was right in front of them, which was a slightly surly but pretty obedient, pretty controlled, pretty responsible and reasonable person who just needed to try some things. They hadn’t grown up in a culture where they could try some things. You miss one percentage point on an entrance exam and then you’re not going to medical school—that’s how it worked in India.

But we were learning together, of course. That’s only something I know in retrospect. At the time, it cleaved me in two. I couldn’t stand that I was making them unhappy, but I also couldn’t stop. We’re all wired to seek out our own happiness, right?

Do you feel like they’ve become more “American” too?

Very much. My brother’s almost six years younger than me. By the time he got to be in middle school and high school, they had settled in, they had friends in the community, they understood so much more about where they were. They got to know his friends’ parents. So they were comfortable letting him hang out. And they had me to call if they had any questions. I was the third parent. I really was, from the beginning, and I loved it. I relished the role.

This is like, our one remaining piece of baggage, truly, because we worked through everything else. When I go, “You guys were so controlling in high school and I need you to apologize for it,” they’re just like, “We had to do it. We had to do it, you were out of control.”

I was raging because I was in a cage. But we’ll get there­—I’ll get ’em. I’ll get ’em eventually.

Do you think reading this book will bring them closer to getting there?

They were the first people to read it, and I talked to them multiple times a week while I was writing it. It was all done with the input of my parents—they’re very much baked into this book. So much of the writing was done after Zooms with my mom or dad or Zooms with my aunts and uncles. It took so many family members to write this book. Our collective memory got poured into it.

My dad kept trying to not have difficult conversations. I was writing a chapter about my parents’ relationship, which is maybe one of my favorites, because I really got them. I set a 90-minute Zoom, and he did not want to do it. But I said, “If you don’t do it, and if you don’t figure out how to talk about your feelings, I am going to have to give [my publisher] their money back.” And he was like, “Okay, when?”

I know people are scared of writing about their parents and their family, but I believe you can treat them with empathy and bring them to the table without making them feel attacked. That’s the approach. How can they argue with your feelings?

I love what your therapist says in the book about how pain is passed down until someone has the bandwidth and resources to process it. Did the book help you do that?

One hundred percent. It was such a hard book to write. I cried and cried and raged for two years, and now I feel 1,000 pounds lighter. It was eight hours of therapy, all day every day. I did it for me, and I did it for my parents, and I did it for my kids, because I don’t want them to be carrying all that stuff around, the effects of my behavior or my responses to things. I’m so much calmer, so much happier, after writing the book. I’m such a better parent. It’s been crazy—to be aware of the patterns that I might be passing down and try to catch them in my kids, or at least talk to them about it.

I can’t tell if it’s just me or if the processing of ancestral trauma is a big topic right now.

This huge wave of immigrant kids is coming of age, right? And never has therapy been more accessible. We’re talking about all different kinds of communities who are at the same time going, “Wait a minute, I don’t have to feel this way? I don’t have to be this way? These patterns can be changed? What have I carried forward with me?” We’re all just starting to have these conversations at the same time.

There’s also a line where you say that actively seeking out joy felt like flying right up to the sun. I don’t know if this idea of joy feeling dangerous is connected to being an immigrant or being a woman, but I think that, for most people who are processing ancestral trauma, therapy also has to do with learning to not be so scared of joy.

Yeah. It feels terrifying. It feels like falling off a cliff. And it’s supposed to, and that’s so scary—like, where can this possibly take me? A lot of us come from “keep your head down” cultures. “Don’t draw any attention to yourself.” And so any kind of exuberance, any kind of delight, is an opportunity to be struck down by forces unknown. I’m only just starting to learn.

I’m writing my next book about this—about reconnecting with joy and pleasure without blowing up my life. I mean, we read a lot of narratives about women who blow up their lives, and good for them. I just don’t want to.

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Priyanka Mattoo is a writer, filmmaker, former talent agent, and a co-founder of Earios, a women-led podcast network. She is a contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker, and a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. Mattoo holds degrees in Italian and law from the University of Michigan and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and kids.