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May 20, 2017cdleekeenan rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
If you love to read, it seems reasonable you might be drawn to a book by a writer who is discussing why she writes. That may have been why I picked up "In Other Words", but the reason I read through it with enormous pleasure is the utter frankness and honesty I felt from Jhumpa Lahiri as she described her life, her parents immigrants from India, she brought up in Rhode Island from the age of two. She was and is consumed with language. She is also a West Bengali Indian brought up in an America that is frequently unkind to non-Whites. She has many compatriots (my wife included) who are thoroughly American but not White, and I found her story gripping, frustrating, humorous, intense. The combination of her love for language and writing and her deeply seated feeling of not really belonging, anywhere, moved her to study a THIRD language, to study it so intensely that she grew capable of writing in it. Her story is fascinating and absorbing. I will be returning to it.