Margins
Leave It to Me book cover
Leave It to Me
1997
First Published
2.68
Average Rating
239
Number of Pages
Debby DiMartino: saved from death in infancy by Gray Nuns at an Indian desert outpost; adopted as a toddler by Manfred and Serena DiMartino of Schenectady, New York; coming of age an inherently exotic girl in an inherently American town, never sure if she was someone special or just a special kind of misfit. Now, at 23, she's decided that it's time to find out: time to track down her biological parents. She knows only the barest facts about them: her mother was a California flower child; her father, an 'Asian national' serving life in an Indian prison for murder. She knows that they were 'lousy people who'd considered me lousier still and who'd left me to be sniffed at by wild dogs, like a carcass in the mangy shade.' Her only inheritance from them is a literally haunting past ('white-hot sky and burnt-black leaves...star bursts of yearning'), but now she wants revenge too. 'When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything,' Debby says as she leaves home for San Francisco, where, if she can't find her mother, she suspects she can appropriate what she needs. Yet, once there, living the life of her newly named persona, Devi Dee ("Tenderloin prowler, all allure and strength and zero innocence'), she senses that she may have inherited more than she imagined: a legacy of shocking idea and impulse begins to reveal itself as Debby/Devi focuses her sights on the woman who may be her 'bio-mom,' or just a dangerously unprepared proxy.
Avg Rating
2.68
Number of Ratings
233
5 STARS
8%
4 STARS
16%
3 STARS
31%
2 STARS
26%
1 STARS
19%
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Author

Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee
Author · 13 books

Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian-born award winning American writer who explored the internal culture clashes of her immigrant characters in the award-winning collection The Middleman and Other Stories and in novels like Jasmine and Desirable Daughters. Ms. Mukherjee, a native of Calcutta, attended schools in England, Switzerland and India, earned advanced degrees in creative writing in the United States and lived for more than a decade in Canada, affording her a wealth of experience in the modern realities of multiculturalism. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and a master’s degree from the University of Baroda, in Gujarat, in 1961. After sending six handwritten stories to the University of Iowa, she was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied with Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily in her first year. She earned an M.F.A. in 1963 and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1969 at Iowa. After years of short-term academic appointments, Ms. Mukherjee was hired in 1989 to teach postcolonial and world literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Bharati Mukherjee died on Saturday, January 28, 2017 in Manhattan. She was 76.

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