Welcome friend! I have a preference for physical books and I love getting my local library to add new titles to their collection. They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us by Prachi Gupta is the most recent title I wished for which the amazing librarians granted! This is an intimate memoir about a South-Asian American family. Take a look at what all it will cover:
Prachi Gupta | Goodreads
An Indian American daughter reveals how the dangerous model minority myth fractured her family in this searing, brave memoir.
How do we understand ourselves when the story about who we are supposed to be is stronger than our sense of self? What do we stand to gain—and lose—by taking control of our narrative? These questions propel Prachi Gupta’s heartfelt memoir and can feel particularly fraught for immigrants and their children who live under immense pressure to belong in America.
Prachi Gupta’s family embodied the American a doctor father and a nurturing mother who raised two high-achieving children with one foot in the Indian American community, the other in Pennsylvania’s white suburbia. But their belonging was predicated on a powerful that Asian Americans have perfected the alchemy of middle-class life, raising tight-knit, ambitious families that are immune to hardship. Molding oneself to fit this perfect image often comes at a steep but hidden cost. In They Called Us Exceptional, Gupta articulates the dissonance, shame, and isolation of being upheld as an American success story while privately navigating traumas invisible to the outside world.
Gupta addresses her mother throughout the book, weaving a deeply vulnerable personal narrative with history, postcolonial theory, and research on mental health, to show how she slowly made sense of her reality and freed herself emotionally and physically from the pervasive, reductive myth that had once defined her. But, tragically, the act that liberated Gupta was also the act that distanced her from those she loved most. By charting her family’s slow unraveling and her determination to break the cycle, Gupta shows how traditional notions of success keep us disconnected from ourselves and one another—and passionately argues why we must orient ourselves toward compassion over belonging.
Content notes include emotional abuse, domestic abuse, suicide attempt, racism, sexual assault, physical abuse, xenophobia, sexism, suicidal ideation.
They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us – Review
I love Prachi’s writing! She has a talent for putting complex situations into words and evolving an emotional response from me. Though she had a penchant for writing at a young age, being able to present personal matters in an intimate and moving manner came from years of hard work.
Mother-Daughter Relationship
One of the saddest truths uncovered in the first few pages is how Prachi and her mother don’t talk anymore. She writes, “It was not until I began to articulate my own story that I realized how little I knew about yours. You and I cannot speak because we live on opposite sides of that story. We cannot speak because my truth negates yours, and yours negates mine.” How does a daughter arrive at this?
In They Called Us Exceptional, Prachi writes to her mother, pouring in things she said and others she never said. Her mother moved to North America after her marriage and it was heartbreaking to read about how she never developed her own support system and was limited to her husband, who wasn’t very encouraging. Her contact with her home was limited in those days with occasional overseas phone calls and letters and even fewer trips home when the children were young. Older now, Prachi understands the grief of separation from her home and though she is unable to ask her mother, she knows the loneliness of existence without anyone to turn to. She says this beautifully:
“I had just assumed that the West, the land of opportunity, was so obviously the best place to live. The idea that the West represents modernity and the East is stuck in some primitive, ancient past rooted in the West’s orientalist lie. My own assumptions about who you were and what you wanted, founded upon this lie, made it impossible for me to see you beyond the role you played in our household.” – Quote from the book
Colonialism, Feminism, and Subjugation
Prachi takes this opportunity to dig into feminist texts and colonial subtexts of situations like her mother’s. She shares her learning from Speaking the Unspeakable by Margaret Abraham (Goodreads) that explains the pipe dream sold to South Asian women who married South Asian men from the West – the West being a land of opportunities. But was it true?
It was heartbreaking to read this: “But South Asian men from the West who sought South Asian brides in the East, as Papa did, often played out their orientalist fantasies of a demure, subservient woman who could restore the brown masculinity robbed by white men in the West also as colonialism advertises.”
As I write this review, I realize how central this observation is to this book, not only because it is about Prachi’s father but because it also applies to Prachi’s brother. They Called Us Exceptional portrays Yush’s struggles with rejection from his white peers, first in school and then in the workplace, and the drastic steps he took to make himself feel better.
Since the memoir spans a few decades, Prachi’s profession as a journalist and the time she spent in understanding her past had an effect that was contrasting to how her brother handled situations. It was also fascinating to me to see how the changed American political climate affected the family members.
Learning from Betrayal
Wounds run deep though and to be betrayed by a parent is not an easy thing to forgive but that does not mean that little acts of courage and love by her mother went unnoticed by Prachi. She shares numerous incidents that in hindsight brought shame and showed her upon reflection that she had also contributed to her mother’s diminutive role in the household. She hasn’t tried to get to know her motivations and desires. She had expected her mother to speak up against her father and then loathed her for being weak. But at the same time, as a child in the household, she felt betrayed and manipulated. She did not have anyone to turn to and had to find a way to survive.
The efforts it takes to look at our conduct with such honesty take courage. As I read this book, I felt sad but also proud. Here is an amazing example of looking at our past and learning from it. Though the outcomes may not change and relationships that are strained cannot be repaired by the knowledge, the fact that something is so deeply understood and our role is clear to us is a way forward, waiting for when the opening will be available.
Indian Culture – The Perception and the Reality
When I was growing up in India, we had many perceptions of what people in North America are like. Popular media portrayed a sense of pride in how Indian family structures are – divorce is frowned upon, dating is taboo. But like any stereotype, the real experience is a lot nuanced and shatters the simplistic picture being presented. I personally did not have such illusions since I came from a divorced family but it was not surprising that as children of Indian parents, Prachi and Yush grew up with a certain image of their culture. I liked young Prachi’s honest perception of white people and how their mistreatment of her and her brother solidified these ideas.
Education is given emphasis in India. Working hard gets people places and that is the message that Prachi received from her father. He encouraged her in science and technology related things that he saw as potentially leading to a good future. He dissuaded her from arts and sports and took those activities away as punishment when he was unhappy with her.
There is a chapter in this book when Prachi visits India with her parents and realizes how different the country and culture are from what she has been told. The kind of pressure that she imagined because it was put on her does not exist on her cousins. It’s incidents like these that start to collect like a dam in her mind that eventually break and force her to see what is true and was a fabricated lie to control her.
Breaking the Cycle
The emotional and physical abuse inflicted by Prachi’s father, primarily on her mother, and then later at Prachi escalated as time passed. While Prachi could escape, her mother was unable to. They Called Us Exceptional is the tale of the daughter coming to understand her mother’s situation maybe too late and taking ownership of how she contributed to where they have come.
As Prachi grew older, she started to share her experiences with her friends and family, guided by her own inner compass. There is this illusion of a perfect family that her father wanted them to portray to the community but it just wasn’t the case. She had to fight the idea that her father’s behavior was typical of a strict Indian father. “Such dismissals normalized mistreatment and implied that our dysfunction was an inevitability resulting from our cultural or ethnic identities. The refusal to seek explanations beyond these tropes had severe consequences.”
Personal Connection with They Called Us Exceptional
They Called Us Exceptional left me emotionally charged. I loved the brutal honesty of this book. It gave me much to think about, particularly when I was reading about Prachi’s mother. I moved to Canada when I was 20 to pursue graduate education. As hard as that time was and as fortunate as I was to have my father here to support me and have a place to call home, the people I met, the support networks I built, the experience I got gave me confidence to become who I am today. I think education or a work environment are important to settle in a foreign country because being limited to one’s community, while comforting in the beginning, makes it a very small world later.
This may be a memoir centred around a South-Asian American family but I believe that readers from all backgrounds would find something to relate to in it. At a human level, Prachi’s book is exemplary of the efforts that go into understanding our upbringings and learning who we are outside of who our parents think we are.
Many of us move out of our parents’ homes in our twenties. If we are blessed with long lives, there are many years ahead of not being tied so intimately to our parents anymore. Having a job, meeting new people outside of our local communities expands our world in ways that we can only understand in hindsight, should we want to. They Called Us Exceptional confronts the good and the bad of the past while having hope that the future will be better and we have some influence on it.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who loves memoirs. Add it to your Goodreads shelf.
If you enjoyed Tara Westover’s Educated, this one will give you similar but different things to think about. Ariel and I discussed it back in November 2020! How time flies!
Thanks for reading. 🙂
Be First to Comment