Some girls are too loud for the rooms they’re put in.
This is the story of one of them.

Growing up in a fractured home, Yashika learned early that the world had very specific ideas about what she was supposed to be. Quieter. Smaller. Less.

She was none of those things.

Crooked Teeth, Red Hair is a memoir about chronic illness and first heartbreaks, about the teachers who save you and the boys who don’t, about finding your people in the wreckage of the people who weren’t yours. It is about the years you spend performing yourself into existence before you understand that existence never required a performance.

Written by a clinical psychologist who spent five years learning the technical language for everything that had happened to her, this is an honest, unsparing, occasionally furious account of growing up female in modern India. Of the damage that moves quietly through families. Of the love that arrives, improbably, anyway.

It will make you laugh. It will make you furious on her behalf. It will make you feel, on the last page, that you have been seen.
For every woman who was told she was too much and decided, quietly, that this was not her problem to fix.

Content note: This memoir contains honest accounts of trauma, chronic illness, and mental health, written with clinical care and without sensationalism.