books that emotionally destroyed me (I'd do anything to read them again)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]I have a question for you all.

[00:00:02]Kabhi kisi kitab ko padh ke foot foot ke roye ho? Have you ever felt like staring at a wall for hours at end just because you read a book and you can't get it out of your head?

[00:00:13]Today I'm going to talk about a few books that emotionally destroyed me in the best possible way. Like not just because oh it made me sad kitab thi, but because these books cracked open something inside of me. These books left me angry, frustrated, agitated, and exhausted, emotionally exhausted.

[00:00:38]Some of these books are about grief.

[00:00:40]Some of them are about survival. Some of them are about childhood trauma and some are about the kind of violence that exists within love.

[00:00:50]Okay, so the first one is Jennette McCurdy's I'm Glad My Mom Died. I know, very weird title, right? I mean, a title that makes you think that why would somebody write something like that? And if you look at the cover of this book, you would see that it is literally Jennette McCurdy holding like a vase just may ashes and urn just may ashes rakhi jati and she's just smiling. And first look, like one look at the cover and you are thinking What?

[00:01:21]Why would somebody do that? Why would this is so so emotionless?

[00:01:26]But no, that is not it. When you read the book, you realize why the title is that, why the cover page is that. There is something deeply unsettling about how funny this book is. I mean, an emotional book talking about your childhood trauma is not supposed to be funny, right? But it somehow is. Because you'll be laughing at one line and then you'd suddenly realize that oh, this is a child talking about the abuse that they went through while never knowing that they were being abused. And what destroyed me the most is that Jennette wrote this book in present tense, which meant that we were going through what a child was going through. And there was no adult voice stepping in to explain anything at all.

[00:02:20]Which somehow made it way more devastating than it should be because we see a child wanting the approval of her mother, wanting her mother's love, and never getting it. This child's entire personality is just about pleasing her mother even when this same mother is encouraging eating disorder in this child.

[00:02:44]She's controlling her body, she's controlling her life, she's controlling her career, she's controlling everything. And the whole time I kept thinking that how many adults actually saw it all happen and never once intervened just because the abuse of this one child was making profit for them all. Like Jennette McCurdy was a very famous like Nickelodeon child star, right?

[00:03:19]They like there are such horrifying stories that the child stars they grow up around drugs, they grow up with eating disorders and whatnot. And we see the trajectory that their life takes and how horribly some of their lives end.

[00:03:36]If only there ever was one adult But never once does that adult show up in any of their lives? And I think that's what stayed with me most after I finished reading the book. Not just the complex relationship between the mother and daughter, but also the constant the constant failure of every adult around that child who chose to ignore everything that was happening. And the second book is Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson.

[00:04:16]Jeanette Winterson has written this memoir where she explains her relationship with her stepmother where the stepmother is extremely religious and keeps on throwing these phrases at her trying to scare her of the devil and how the devil had just thrown a wrong crib in their house. I mean, just imagine.

[00:04:47]This person hates me. This person doesn't want me there.

[00:04:55]And this other person keeps telling this kid key "How many to kiss me to eat me like just imagine the emotional catastrophe that must be her mind." Like Jeanette Winterson also talks about how job will put gallant cutie according to her stepmother. She would be thrown in the school hole and just reading that entire scene, you feel so like claustrophobic.

[00:05:26]And I think what broke me the most about this book isn't just that it's about childhood trauma, but also the fact that it tells you what happens to the person who grows up with such childhood trauma. Like how do they carry all of this into their adulthood?

[00:05:44]And how much it impacts their entire life.

[00:05:48]And in this book you also see Jeanette Winterson constantly trying to find her birth mother and that search is so sad and you constantly keep feeling that yeah, if only this kid was shown at least some some form of love, maybe they would not have grown up with so much sadness and so much grief in their heart.

[00:06:09]The next book that I want to talk about is Young Mungo. It is written by Douglas Stuart who's also the author of Shuggie Bain. Shuggie Bain has like you know received international recognition and rightfully so, but I don't think a lot of people recognize Young Mungo for the kind of like exceptional book it is.

[00:06:29]This book hurt me in such slow and creeping way like you know that something terrible is going to happen on the next page and you still can't stop reading it because you want to know you want to know if somebody just comes and save this person, but then you realize that nobody ever does come to save such people.

[00:06:51]So Mungo is a boy who's extremely fragile and such a gentle character like the kind of character that you want to save for yourself and he exists in this world that is hyper masculine and that keeps questioning his masculinity and that has very weird and tainted ideas about what a man is supposed to be. His relationship with James absolutely wrecked me not because it was like grand and romantic in that way, but because it was so quiet and so tender. Like they used to care for pigeons together and what happens to the both of them later in the book is just completely heartbreaking. I like I remember sobbing during some specific scenes like time and again in that book Mungo is betrayed so often so often by the people around him, by the people around him who were supposed to save him from all the brutalities of the world. They are the ones who give him the kind of trauma that nobody, let alone a child, deserves.

[00:07:56]It is honestly, according to me, the kind of book that job up but let you will skip out me it makes you sit simmering in anger and anxiety at the thought that why is this world this way?

[00:08:08]Why do people want boys to just destroy themselves and their sensibilities just to come across as a man or like fit into the ideals and structures of masculinity in this society. Then there's this book called I know why the caged bird sings by Maya Angelou. I read Maya Angelou during my college days.

[00:08:32]Uh like Uh when you get one thing to have my syllabus may be and thankfully, thankfully, this memoir was also in our syllabus. Like Maya Angelou is known for writing beautiful memoirs, beautiful memoirs. And when you go both sides both sides memoirs look here. I know why the caged bird sings is the first memoir. So it actually captures the first few, the very first few years of her life. And you see and why I specifically related so much with this memoir was because like when she's born uh she is dropped off to her grandmother's place by her mother because her mother is out there working and you know, building her own life and like failing and succeeding in her own life and she can't handle having a kid with her. And then it's just this kid who lives with her grandmother and she doesn't know like often times she feels like she's a burden but then like her grandmother shows her the kind of kindness and love that she never saw anywhere else, but then as she's a kid something absolutely brutal happens to her. Of course, she's like sexually abused and she goes mute for a few years and like it is one of the kind of books that make you realize the kind of traumas that you have been through like as in our psychology may both they have uh repressed memories notion that you have been through trauma that trauma who when you have your childhood memories trauma as they grow up they really which trigger who that so like a memory is revealed to them that their mind was compartmentalizing for a very long time and something similar happened to me when I was reading this book and I realized that oh this has happened to me and it destroyed me like reading that made me realize that oh there are other people in the world who have suffered in the ways that I have suffered and that it also gave me a kind of reassurance in the sense that they have fought through it all with such resilience and such courage then maybe I I can too fight, right? This book we also see racism through the eyes of a very young child. The same thing that happens with uh Tony Morrison and the bluest eye is another such book that absolutely destroyed me because in that we see this young girl named Pecola uh who's a black girl and she wants blue eyes and you know a fair skin and blonde hair because she thinks that if she has that people will treat her kindly because no matter how much we say that the world is a nice place it definitely is not and racism is something that is extremely prevalent even as we um like there have been instances where if a privileged white kid is let's say kidnapped or lost, people would be more worried about that kid and show more sensitivity towards that kid than let's say if a black or a brown kid is kidnapped or lost. That's just the way that the world is and both these books show that so beautifully.

[00:11:59]I know why the cage bird sings of course is a memoir so we we know that this author actually experienced all of this first hand and by the end of this book she actually comes out as this powerhouse like Maya Angelou actually ended up becoming the first female um conductor of a bus in San Francisco, a black female conductor which was a huge deal and like by the time that you're done with the book you feel triumphant, you feel like you have won something through that person's journey. Coming closer to home, there's this book called A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. I think to this day this is a like one of those books that has emotionally exhausted me the most the most. I don't think any book has ever been able to do that. This book is set during the emergency period in India and it follows the lives of four people who are considered completely disposable in the eyes of the political system that they reside in and throughout the book we see how their lives are constantly impacted by the politics that happen around them. These people somehow actually like find a life together. Like there's there are these two characters, they are Tata Batiga, then there is this one guy who has come from somewhere else to Mumbai to study, then there is this one woman who's renting out her apartment, and we see them building a life together in the sense that they laugh, they cook uh in the sense that they laugh, they cook together, and we see how wholesome it can be to find a family in strangers.

[00:13:43]Like, it actually does the found family trope so well, and it is because we get so in like engrossed in their life that when the politics of their city, of their nation starts impacting them, we realize how close we are to such lives.

[00:14:01]Be it the forced sterilizations, the destruction of slums, or the humiliation that people are supposed to endure every single day. It shows that so well. This book for me, for a person living in a post-colonial nation, in a nation that is constantly defined by the politics of everything that's happening in the nation, it made me realize that I might think that I am outside of the radar of all of this, and that um like, whatever decisions the government takes, it's not going to impact me because I am in the majority.

[00:14:39]There will come a day when I will be impacted by it, and I would not be ready for it at all. And I mean, the last scene of that book, it it has stayed with me to this day. Every time I go to a local train station, or I am stepping out of a local train, or I see a local train coming, I always always remember the last scene of this book because I mean, it is a giant book.

[00:15:13]I read it during COVID time, and I remember I finished it in a week because I was just not able to put it down. I was reading it day and night. And I remember uh I remember my heart started just thumping so loudly because I had a feeling that I knew what was coming and I was just not ready for it and I was hoping I was praying what I was thinking it doesn't happen and when it did happen like that was the last sentence of that book and I can't tell you like even right now talking about it I have goosebumps because it just it impacted me that much and I don't think I'll ever be able to take it out of my head at all and I think I genuinely definitely believe that we should be reading more such books that move us to such extent because in this age of like AI and Instagram and all of these social media platforms where like you are being fed a story within 30 seconds within 1 minute and you are so like you've gotten used to because the algorithm has made you you know used to feeling the whole spectrum of emotion like in a in a minute.

[00:16:54]And that is not how lives are lived.

[00:16:57]That is not how art is experienced. It is only when you read something this deeply moving that you realize that oh, this is how I'm supposed to understand the lives of the people that I might never meet but it is very important. I think that people these days are not as empathetic majorly because they are not living the lives of other people. They are not able to put themselves in the shoes of other people, and that won't happen ever if people are not reading books like this up to But I just think that that people who have been through this kind of situation in their lives and have been through this kind of discrimination and all that kind of stuff in their lives and have been through this kind of situation in their lives and have been through this kind of discrimination just so much that I want to say but I think I need to make a part two of it because as I said these are books that are experienced. These are journeys that are lived. So I will also try not to rush through this entire list of books because I genuinely genuinely want you to read these books.

[00:17:52]I don't want that to happen. I really really desperately want people to read these books because you can see school curriculum in the new home. You can see university syllabus in the new home. In fact, the way that people are these days behaving towards literature and arts, I'm pretty sure that soon these books will not even be heard of. But even then I will make sure that I am the loudest when I'm talking about these books because they really do need to be heard.

[00:18:08]So yeah, today I'm going to stop here for now.

[00:18:11]There is so much more that I want to say, but I think I'll make a part two of it because as I said, these are books that are experienced. These are journeys that are lived. So I will also try not to rush through this entire list of books because I genuinely genuinely want you to read these books. I don't want that to happen. I really really desperately want people to read these books because you can see school curriculum in the new home. You can see university syllabus in the new home. In fact, the way that people are these days behaving towards literature and arts, I'm pretty sure that soon these books will not even be heard of. But even then I will make sure that I am the loudest when I'm talking about these books because they really do need to be heard.

[00:18:41]So yeah, today I'm going to stop here.

[00:18:42]Please please please go read these books and if you do pick them up, I think today I'll stop here for now. There is so much more that I want to say, but I think I'll make a part two of it because as I said, these are books that are experienced. These are journeys that are lived. So I will also try not to rush through this entire list of books because I genuinely genuinely want you to read these books. I don't want that to happen. I really really desperately want people to read these books because you can see school curriculum in the new home. You can see university syllabus in the new home. In fact, the way that people are these days behaving towards literature and arts, I'm pretty sure that soon these books will not even be heard of. But even then I will make sure that I am the loudest when I'm talking about these books because they really do need to be heard. So yeah, today I'm going to stop here. Please please please go read these books and if you do pick them up, I think today I'll stop here for now. There is so much more that I want to say, but I think I'll make a part two of it because as I said, these are books that are experienced. These are journeys that are lived. So I will also try not to rush through this entire list of books because I genuinely genuinely want you to read these books.

[00:19:10]I don't want that to happen. I really really desperately want people to read these books because you can see school curriculum in the new home. You can see university syllabus in the new home. let me know how you're liking them. I hope I hope they move you like they moved me. I hope they impact your life the way that they have impacted my life, the way that they have changed the way I look at life. A lot of my friends tell me that I have too many principles or my jeez what do you morality or ethics go salad you. But I think if you don't have our principles, if we don't have our morals, our ethics, we are no different than animals and I would not want to live in a world where people are not empathetic and I think these are the books that make you empathetic. So yeah, go read them and then let me know if you like them or not. Go by.