Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love

Product Information

After recently having lost my own mother, I find myself gravitating towards reads that explore mother/daughter relationships as it provides me with a sense of comfort I can’t quite articulate.

The emotions and feelings, and the characters that inhabit the stories resonate, there is a commonality and authenticity that will captivate readers. They all seem to be on the verge of a crisis and tend to overreact to normal family disputes (going so far as to commit matricide). Nearly all of the daughters hated or were reproachful of their mothers, they are married to bland white men who lack critical thinking and seem wholly unaware of their privilege, the daughters/wives themselves are portrayed as hysterical, moody, and spiteful. Exploring different relationships - mother and daughter, friendships, young love, spouses - Qureshi pulls apart the emotions surrounding each one, making even the darker narratives relatable and evocative.I, being someone of Indian ethnicity living in Canada found some of the anecdotal experiences not all that disparate. These are stories about children and parents trying to establish an elusive connection between generations, spouses learning the nature of love and marriage, lovers and friends who are losing and finding each other. Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love is definitely a good read, immersing one in its atmosphere. There is a sense relatability particularly in the way families, tradition and expectations from the older generations versus new were written. Bought it initially moved only by the beautiful cover and enticing title, and I thought short stories would make me read quicker (and it's a genre that's been heavily growing on me through the years).

For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage. The women generally had issues with the figures they associated with their brown identity and glorified the figures that they associated with their 'Western' identity. These tales vividly capture the experience of feeling constrained by family expectations, but also of not quite fitting the norms of British culture either . countless themes are conveyed through the experiences of characters from a variety of backgrounds: cultural and generational tensions, diaspora, friendships in all of their forms- intense and fleeting, lost-lasting yet still dissolvable- endings and beginnings, gender, class, inferility, the shedding of your childhood skin, the desire to belong, to yearn for someone, and to discover your true self whether that be within a relationship or outside of one.Not only were the characters different shades of unlikeable but they just did not ring true to life. Vivid descriptive language draws you in to her characters’ worlds, whether it be an English village in the quirky The Jam Maker or the Tuscan countryside of Small Differences. A strung-out mother’s eyes feel “as thin as paper from sleeplessness, as though if she rubbed them too hard they might accidentally rip apart”. Huma Qureshi’s writing struck a cord for me in her concise, brilliant writing, encompassing whole lives and worlds in so few pages.

Every aspect of her body or personality was up for inspection: too big, too small, too available, too hidden, too much, not enough. The two of them bring to the south of France a lifetime of recriminations and resentments, something perfectly ordinary but which manifests in a chillingly extraordinary way at the dramatic end of the story. I think she comes up against a voice limitation when narrating from a hapless boyfriend’s POV, but in another story she perfectly captures an unwittingly oppressive mother’s tone.

But usually, Qureshi takes the reader plausibly inside the inner recesses of characters’ hearts and minds.