New Delhi : Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, whose 544-page memoir will be published in November, has said writing about her life meant opening herself up and sharing experiences she had kept deep inside, as she reflected on the heartbreak and loss that drew her into politics.
“It was heartbreak and loss that threw me into the public world of politics. Up till then I had guarded my privacy fiercely,” Gandhi said in a statement issued on August 18, Tuesday, by publisher Alfred A Knopf, which has its headquarters in New York.
“Writing about my life did not come easily to me. It meant opening myself up, sharing moments and experiences I had always held deep inside,” she said.
Titled Belonging: A Journey of Love, the memoir will be released in hardcover and ebook by Knopf on November 10, with an audio edition to be published by Penguin Random House.
The publisher said an announced first printing of 100,000 copies has been set.
Gandhi said she wanted the book to be a “testament of my heart’s journey through the tender joys and dark despair” that marked her life.
“Much has been written about my family, but few narratives were able to reach into the truth of their motivations, their actions and even their very human failings,” she said, adding that the book was “in many ways” a homage to their “humanness”.
The memoir traces Gandhi’s journey from her childhood in post-war Italy to her life in India, where she married Rajiv Gandhi and became the daughter-in-law of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Gandhi said that as she gradually removed herself from the political sphere and looked back at what she had witnessed, the “thread of love and loyalty” running through her life became clearer.
She described this journey as moving from “the simplicity of my childhood in small-town Italy” to the complexity of her years in India.
The book begins in Cambridge, England, in 1965, where Sonia Maino, then a 19-year-old student, falls in love at first sight with Rajiv Gandhi, whom she would later marry.
It recounts her introduction to Indira Gandhi, her efforts to learn Hindi, wear saris and relish Indian cuisine, as well as the tragedies that struck the Gandhi family.(PTI)
Writing about my life was not easy: Sonia Gandhi
