‘COMING OUT SOLO: A Memoir’ is Roy’s first work of non-fiction. It is about her owning up to her single status, haltingly, over half a decade; and coming to a point where she could finally accept and embrace being solo: of having an individual identity beyond marriage, without the express hope of new companionship in the future. It is a journey, she feels, that would resonate with many.
In 2017, when she returned to Kolkata after a decade of living and working in the Netherlands, it was not just a relocating back to a hometown for her, but the beginning of a radical new phase in her life: returning home with a small child to live with her recently widowed father, leaving behind a marriage of eighteen years. It also meant starting over in her career from scratch, at 43. Her octogenarian father was devastated, but he stood by her.
For the next five years, she would slowly grow into her new skin as a single mother – her new identity never denied but never quite acknowledged either – and eventually ‘come out’ solo after her divorce, owning up to a status that is still judged upon in Indian society. It is a blog she wrote (‘Kolkata Diaries’, KD) during this long transition that helped her evolve in this path; the blog posts themselves changing from a quotidian archiving of her renewed relationship with her city and natal home – with her past ever present and lives that impinged on hers – to a Covid chronicle during the pandemic years, and then morphing into personal essays of a moral reckoning with her ‘self’ and society.
Looking back, she finds KD can be divided into three distinct phases: the first year – end 2018 to 2019; the pandemic years – 2020 and 2021; and the year life returned to normalcy – 2022. These three phases – titled ‘Coming Back Home’, ‘Coping with Covid’ and ‘Coming Out Solo’ – constitute the three main sections of her memoir.
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