The daugh­ter of an Indi­an Jain father and an Amer­i­can Jew­ish moth­er, writer Diane Mehta has spent a life­time explor­ing her iden­ti­ty and search­ing for mean­ing in her some­times painful exis­tence. In this book of kalei­do­scop­ic essays, she digs deep into her past and her fam­i­ly, exam­in­ing her place in the world.

Mehta con­trasts the warm, col­or­ful, riotous free­dom and sense of belong­ing she felt among extend­ed fam­i­ly in Bom­bay, where she spent her ear­ly child­hood enjoy­ing the priv­i­leges of the Anglo-Indi­an elite, with the cold, ster­ile sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey town where she moved with her fam­i­ly at the age of sev­en. In Amer­i­ca, she was scorned and mocked, a vic­tim of racist and anti­se­mit­ic taunts. While there is a clear demar­ca­tion into before and after, Mehta is too thought­ful to wal­low in nos­tal­gia, and scru­ti­nizes her mem­o­ries along­side the offi­cial fam­i­ly doc­u­ments, pho­tos, and oth­er mem­o­ra­bil­ia she unearths.

While there is some rep­e­ti­tion, since these were orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten as stand­alone essays requir­ing back­sto­ry, Mehta’s wide-rang­ing mind keeps the col­lec­tions from feel­ing stale or monot­o­nous. With extend­ed riffs on Thorn­ton Wilder’s Our Town, Mil­ton’s Par­adise Lost (the source of the book’s title phrase), Brook­lyn’s Prospect Park, and clas­si­cal music, Mehta turns her pen­e­trat­ing eye on any­thing that cap­tures her inter­est and can be mined to shed light on the essay’s main topic.

Mehta probes her rela­tion­ship with her moth­er, an unful­filled ​“surly Brook­lyn Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­al” who suf­fered from depres­sion, as well as her par­ents’ unhap­py rela­tion­ship and her own mar­riage and divorce. She exam­ines her father’s strokes and her moth­er’s heart con­di­tion, along with her own intractable migraines, seek­ing the mean­ing of suf­fer­ing and the val­ue of exis­tence in an unre­li­able body.

Though not reli­gious or obser­vant her­self, as a poet and a stu­dent of con­scious­ness, she explores chant­i­ng and recita­tion, Jain and Jew­ish. Inves­ti­gat­ing the con­so­la­tions of prayer and rit­u­al, she explains, ​“I do not need to believe in God to prac­tice the work of the soul.” 

Mehta exper­i­ments with form as well as lan­guage, with two epis­to­lary essays that offer humor­ous and unex­pect­ed takes on seri­ous sub­jects. One in the form of a com­plaint let­ter to a dog-walk­ing com­pa­ny man­ages to encom­pass a pro­found explo­ration of her roman­tic rela­tion­ship and her chron­ic health issues. This type of oblique sto­ry­telling is also evi­dent in an essay about her abor­tion of a fetus with Down syn­drome, which is relat­ed via an extend­ed let­ter to a pet tur­tle (which also some­how works).

Mehta is a poet, and not sur­pris­ing­ly, her essays fea­ture poet­ic and lyri­cal lan­guage, some­times to the point of inscrutabil­i­ty. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a fault, as she is inter­est­ed in prob­ing sub­jects that do not have easy expla­na­tions. While dis­cussing her dif­fi­cul­ties in school with math and sci­ence, she explains, ​“I was inter­est­ed in expe­ri­ence, and I could not under­stand the facts.” This is a use­ful anal­o­gy for her essays, in which she plays with lan­guage to illu­mi­nate deep­er truths. This slim vol­ume is packed with poet­ic and pen­e­trat­ing insights into the human condition.