I find it hard to resist books about young women from small towns who move to the big city, a tendency I blame as much on personal experience as on Muriel Spark and her Girls of Slender Means. Arriving in London in my early 20s, I was often anxious, mostly about money. But the exhilaration I felt whenever I made my way to the top of a red doubledecker usually saw off any deeper fears pretty fast. Like Kay Sohini, whose new graphic memoir tells the story of how she swapped the suburbs of Kolkata for New York, London allowed me briefly to be “a character – a full-fledged, living, breathing manifestation of [an] impossible dream”.
Sohini developed a crush on New York at a young age, a passion born first of TV shows such as Friends and How I Met Your Mother, and later of books by Alison Bechdel, Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath. It seemed to her that the city was not only a muse to writers and other creative types. It was also “a fix for slightly broken people”, a phrase she would one day sadly have cause to apply to herself. At 24, having finally managed to leave a coercive relationship, Sohini found that she wanted only to get as far away from Kolkata as possible – and, naturally, New York, the city she had romanticised for so long, was the first and last destination she considered. In its anonymity and “white noise” she would surely be able to lose herself, half tourist and half PhD student (Stony Brook University on Long Island offered her a full scholarship).
