The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

Overview

Mira is a teacher living in the heart of Suryam, a modern bustling in city India, and the only place in the world the fickle Rasagura fruit grows. Mira lives alone, and with only the French existentialists as companions, until the day she witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in the park. Mira runs to help her but is cautious, for she could have sworn the woman looked around to see if anyone was watching right before the seizure began.

Mira is quickly drawn into the lives of this mysterious woman Sara, who suffers a myriad of unexplained illnesses, and her kind, intensely supportive husband Rahil, striking up intimate, volatile and fragile friendships with each of them that quickly become something more. A moving exploration of loss, Mukherjee delivers an intense and unexpected modern love story as Mira reconciles reality with desire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944700843
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	02/26/2019
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rheea Mukherjee received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in several publications including Scroll.in, Southern Humanities Review, Out of Print, QLRS and Bengal Lights, among others. Her previous stories have been Pushcart nominees, Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Finalists, and semi-finalists for the Black Lawrence Press Award. Rheea spent her childhood in the US and her teens in India. She came back to the States for college and her MFA, and then returned to Bangalore, where she currently resides. She co-founded Bangalore Writers Workshop in 2012 and currently co-runs Write Leela Write, a Design and Content Laboratory in Bangalore. The Body Myth is her first novel. You can learn more about Rheea at www.rheeamukherjee.com.

Editorial Reviews

12/24/2018

Mukherjee’s flawed debut follows Mira, a young, recently widowed teacher in the fictional Indian city of Suryam. Since her husband’s death in a car accident a few years prior, Mira has retreated from the world, occupying herself with a stoic dedication to teaching, her aging father, and the works of Western philosophers. Her self-imposed exile ends when she chances on Sara and Rahil, a young married couple, as Sara suffers a seizure in the park. She is soon drawn into their orbit, becoming lover to both Sara—a hypochondriac and New Age spiritualist—and her caretaker husband, an arrangement that sets Mira on the road to true recovery. The arrangement is more or less frictionless, and Mukherjee’s story suffers for it; when the trio finally split, it feels perfunctory and absent of real conflict. Though the characters, especially Mira, are drawn with rich motivations and passions, the novel comes short of making them fully realized, as emotional development tends to occur off the page. At its best, Mukherjee’s novel encapsulates the heady breathlessness of falling in love; at its worst, it has the consequence-free, exaggerated feel of a soap opera. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Mukherjee explores the boundaries of socially acceptable romantic love in her debut novel, which is also an intriguing exploration of narrative style." —Booklist

"Like the Rasagura fruit Rheea Mukherjee so eloquently writes about, The Body Myth is a tender love story at its core: sweet, sour, and bursting with wisdom. An intoxicating read." —Neel Patel, author of If You See Me, Don't Say Hi

"Witty, melancholic, and dramatic by turns, Rheea Mukherjee’s The Body Myth is a touching love story about misfits searching for togetherness, even if that togetherness might not be healthy for all concerned… The Body Myth is a compelling tale, rich in emotional undercurrents and empathy for its unconventional characters." —Foreword Reviews

"Rheea Mukherjee has written a thought provoking and memorable meditation on the meaning of life. In seductive prose, The Body Myth, explores the depths and boundaries of relationships, conventional and unconventional, and the meaning of intimacy in sickness and health. A fine novel." —Soniah Kamal, award winning author of Unmarriageable: Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan

From the Publisher