Do You Know How Lucky You Are

When Rani Neutill receives a disturbing message from her cousin, urging her to travel to India to save her estranged, elderly mother from physical decline and bring her to the US, Rani’s hard-won, stable life in Boston, MA is upended.  For decades, Rani and her mother have been playing a painful game of emotional tug-of-war.  Before it’s too late, Rani must reckon with centuries of inherited trauma if she is to understand the trajectory of her own life (and her mother’s) and decide whether she wishes to summon the power of forgiveness.

Spanning more than three decades and two generations of mother/daughter dynamics, Do You Know How Lucky You Are  travels between Pasadena, California and Kolkata, India, charting Rani’s journey to build a cultural map for herself and to answer questions that have cast a long shadow over her coming of age: What does it mean to be a biracial woman straddling the border between two seemingly incompatible identities? Will she ever truly understand her ancestors and their trauma, or will she always be kept at a remove? What—and where—is “home?”

Rani engages with these questions and more in this incisive and deeply moving debut about a mother and daughter caught up in the tides of history.

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Advance Praise

“Rani Neutill is a writer of passion and conviction. Her story is urgent. Read it.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Sympathizer

“Rarely does memoir so deftly combine beautiful writing with a profoundly important story. Neutill is a master in the making. Race, sexuality, class, religion, and so much more fit effortlessly into a mythical mother/daughter story. You’ll never forget this book.”
—Garrard Conley, New York Times Bestseller and author of Boy Erased