The Day Of
On launching The Girls Are Not Fine
Tomorrow, my book officially launches, and I have nothing left to do.
This is, for me, a deeply destabilizing condition. For weeks, I have been a human Gantt chart. Proofread the PDF, approve the A+ page, coordinate 100 PR boxes, schedule the sends, confirm the moderators, draft the email, and send the email. The work was a buffer. It was how I kept the actual fact of the book, that it exists, that it is leaving my hands, that strangers will read it on a Monday morning commute and decide things about it and about me, at a manageable distance.
The buffer has thinned out to nothing. The boxes have started shipping. The book is printed. The launch is at Crossword Kemps Corner at 6:30 PM tomorrow, and no matter how many times I open and close my inbox, there is nothing left to fix.
So I am sitting with it.
The Girls Are Not Fine is a book about what it costs women to want things, to want big, public, ambitious, unapologetic, incredible things. I wrote it because I needed to understand my own life. I wrote it because I kept meeting women who looked like they had everything and felt like they had nothing, and I wanted to know why. The thesis, roughly, is that we are not fine, that we haven’t been fine for a long time, and that the question is what we do with that fact. (To read more about why the book is called what it is, read this excerpt published by Vogue India!)
It is a slightly absurd book to be launching while not fine.
I have been told, by various well-meaning people, that I should “enjoy this moment.” The moment is not enjoyable in the way “enjoy” usually implies. It is not a glass of wine on a balcony. It is more like the bit at the airport where you’ve already checked your bag, and you cannot uncheck it, so you can either spiral about whether you packed your charger or you can find a coffee. I am, for the record, finding a coffee. But the spiraling about the charger is also there, all the time, in the background.
What I keep coming back to is this: I made a book, and tomorrow it stops being mine. I mean it in a literal, slightly horrified way. For two years this book lived in a Google Doc only I had access to. Then a smaller circle of people. Then PRH. Then blurb-givers. Then ARC readers. Each ring out, the book belonged to me a little less. Tomorrow the rings collapse, and it belongs to whoever picks it up.
I do not get to control what they do with it. They will read sentences I rewrote eleven times and not notice. They will read sentences I dashed off in twenty minutes and quote them in their stories. They will misread me on purpose and by accident. Some people will love the book. Some will hate it. Some will not finish it. Some will underline every page.
The book is going to live a life I do not get to be in.
I think that is what I was actually preparing for, all those weeks of tasks. Not the launch, not really. The surrender.
What I know tonight: I love what I made. I am proud of what I made. I do not know if it will sell, by which I mean justify the bet a major publisher made on a 31-year-old writing nonfiction about women and ambition in India in 2026, and I cannot make it. What I can do is show up at Crossword tomorrow at 6:30, in something black, with my hair done, and talk about the book with Shephali and Ankita and Vidhya in front of a room of people who have decided, on no evidence other than my own conviction, that this matters.
That is already more than I had any right to ask for.
If you are coming tomorrow: thank you. If you preordered: thank you. If you are reading this newsletter at all: thank you. The book exists because, somewhere in the last few years, you told me the things I was writing were worth reading. You’ll probably never know which version of you said which thing on which day.
I do, I do, I do, and I carry it in my heart.
See you tomorrow.
H.