The Good Indian Girl: Breaking Barriers, Bridging Generations is an honest and heartbreaking memoir by Neetha Naidu. It covers Neetha's early years, adolescence, marriage, motherhood, midlife, and the road to self-discovery. Neetha offers insight into her traumatic, hilarious, and wonderful experiences of growing up in a typical middle-class Indian household in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Born prematurely on India's Republic Day in 1975, Neetha was destined to navigate life with self-deprecating humor and awkwardness. In this book, she talks about how she survived school, bullying, sibling rivalry, public humiliation, disappointments, family gossip, strict curfews, arranged marriage, immigration, motherhood, divorce, and online dating in midlife. She shows how she went from being a painfully shy, awkward, and socially anxious girl to a woman who learned to stop caring about what the world expects from her and started living for herself on her own terms.

With humor and heart, Neetha Naidu takes the reader on a nostalgic tour of the pre-Internet era, when life was simple and childhood was magical. The Good Indian Girl provides insight into Indian culture, covering arranged marriages and grooming girls for marriage, the unspoken expectations for young women/wives, the great Indian paradox, Indian weddings and rituals, biodata (the glorified marriage resume), traditional rites of passage, and more. At turns hilarious and tragic, this story of survival, trauma, resilience, love, rebuilding life, and self-discovery is relatable to Indian women and also to those from other cultures born in the pre-internet era, mainly because of the way we learn about Indian culture from Bollywood movies and Hollywood blockbusters. I highly recommend it.

The Good Indian Girl: Breaking Barriers, Bridging Generations by Neetha Naidu is the memoir of a young Indian woman growing up caught between two cultures, and between tradition and modernity. Born prematurely in Southern India on Republic Day, January 26th, 1975, Neetha spent her first month in the hospital neonatal unit. Born into a traditional Indian middle-class family, she was expected to obey unquestioningly and succeed academically. She struggled greatly with both of those expectations throughout her childhood, especially when her younger sister was clearly smarter, sweeter, and more favored than her. Neetha grew up in the India of the 90s, the pre-internet, pre-cellphone, pre-cable television era, where life, love, and romance were dictated more by “Bollywood” than by any sense of reality. Surrounded by her extended family, she contends with the expectations of a traditional arranged marriage and all that entailed. Now, in her fifties, living in Canada, recently divorced, and the mother of two grown children, she uses this unfiltered memoir to look back and question her life choices. 

When I first started reading The Good Indian Girl, my initial reaction was that author Neetha Naidu was probably just an ordinary woman with nothing particularly extraordinary to say. But it is exactly the ordinariness of her life that makes this work stand out so starkly. She perfectly frames the dilemma she and her fellow young Indian women faced as they tried desperately to be loyal to the traditions, faiths, and customs of their parents' generation whilst embracing the freedom, openness, and excitement of the new generation, technology, and morality. What stands out in the writing is the humor, self-deprecation, and honesty with which the author examines her family, her relationships, but most importantly herself, her life decisions, and her place in the world. I loved the freedom she now expresses as she has suddenly realized she has nobody to please but herself and that happiness is in her own hands - that happiness is an inside job. I’m guessing the author may suggest her target audience is women but, as a male reader, I got a lot out of this memoir. The anecdotes relating to her childhood, her insecurities, and her sibling rivalry all resonated with me, as did her mid-life revelation. The descriptions of Indian cultural and religious practices were equally informative. This is a gentle read but one that poses and tries to answer many of life’s burning issues. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.