Cross Writing

Initially the book title – A Touch of India - was supposed to indicate that it has a light touch: it introduces ‘my’ India to readers with a bit of historical fact, a bit of travel information, a bit of biography, a bit of historical memoir (my mother’s story) interlaced with a bit of contemporary India. All of this without beating the reader over the head, literally or metaphorically, with a weighty tome. 

A bit of everything. Including my small touch of Indian blood. But that’s not a good thing as far as a publisher is concerned. Nor even a bookshop. Where will they put it on the shelves? Into which category? Is it a memoir? A history? A travel book? Books have to be categorised. There was the same problem with my first book: The Secret Life of Money. Where should it go? Economics? Sociology? Psychology? Business? Self-help? It could have slotted into any one of these categories. And that’s indeed what happened. Each time I dropped into a bookshop I’d find it shelved differently. 

We all know marketers like messages to be clear and single-tracked. This cross-disciplinary stuff just isn’t easy to sell. You’d think I would have learned, 20 years on, with this latest bit of cross-category writing! And I think my title is partly about this tentativeness. Alternative suggestions seemed too forceful, too definite, too arrogant in a way. At one stage I was tempted to call it My Mother India but there was a wonderful film by this name, which I reviewed, and even spoke about at a showing at ACMI many years ago. 

Several years ago there was a very successful book called Almost French, the memoir of an Australian trying to fit into life in France with a new French partner. I could have called my book Almost Indian, apart from the obvious copy-cattery, because it references my bit of Indian blood – my touch of Indian. 

I decided to stick with A Touch of India.