Em and The Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

In a one-bedroom-hall-kitchen in Mahim, Bombay, Imelda Mendes-Em to her children-holds her family in thrall with her flamboyance, her compelling imagination, her unspoken love, her sometimes cruel candour. Through this, her husband, to whom she was once 'buttercup', her son and daughter learn to cope with her mania and her frequent wish to die. A searing and at times darkly funny, study of mental illness, and also a deeply moving story about love and family relationships.

Wow. What a read. Like reading a story about someone who could be my aunt. Or my own mother - had I been able to bear sticking around... Exhausting and beautiful

Its not often one comes across a book about any kind of mental illness. That too written with sensitivity and from the point of view of family members. It is a love story too, narrated by the child while managing the affected parent. The reader is a part of the family and feels each episode keenly. It was an excellent read without any depressing bits one would usually associate with mental and emotional trauma. Must read.

Em is for empathy! What a beautifully written book on a difficult subject.

I purchased this without a lot of research, and have misinterpreted what it was - I expected a (albeit light) multi-generational Indian story. It sort of it this, but essentially it revolves around Em (Imelda Mendes), and her mental health problems, and her relationship with her husband Augustine Mendes (the Big Hoom), her daughter Susan and her (un-named in this book) son, who is the narrator.

Pinto has woven a present time narrative with a dipping back into family history that reads well, albeit a little overstuffed with information (possibly a result of a first novel - trying to shoe-horn every thought in), covering the couples relationship and early family life.

Despite essentially being a story about postpartum depression, manic-depression and paranoia, suicide attempts and how the family all deal with this, it is treated in an amusing way. Parts are very funny, parts are sad, as you might expect.

There are some good quotes on society, as well as commentary on mental illness.

Schoolchildren can smell a nervous teacher. They see it in her gait as she enters the room, uncertain of her ability to command and instruct. They hear it in her voice as she clears her throat before she begins to speak. They sense it when she looks at the teacher's table and chair, set on a platform to give her a view of the class, as if she has no right to be there. They watch without remorse or sympathy as she walks the gauntlet and suddenly they are in the grip of a completely new sensation. It is power that they are feeling as they anneal into a single organism: the class. At any moment now they will cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.-If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up . . .No, that's stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning.But of all these, I feared the most the possibility that I might go mad too.