But the type I was getting in the form of agents telling me they’d “just signed an Indian author” or editors saying they’d recently had “a book like this” on their list was one of the hardest parts of the journey for me. We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road? I could finally tell my nine-year-old self that I had achieved the dream we had set out on decades earlier. I realized the pen was mightier than the gavel, and left my stable, secure lawyer job for an unpredictable and emotionally rewarding life of helping people who have been underrepresented in media feel seen. Sharing my voice and culture with the world, and having had so many messages from immigrants like me who found themselves in those pages was invigorating. In 2020, over a decade after my first drafts, I landed my first book deal and THE TASTE OF GINGER was published on January 1, 2022. Little by little, the story that I wished had existed when I was a young girl took shape and sentences melded into paragraphs, which flowed into chapters, until I had the book I’d always wished had been on the shelves. I didn’t share with anyone in my professional life that I had this other passion because the legal field can be so competitive that I never wanted anyone to think that I wasn’t committed to my work.
But all the youthful optimism of my twenties couldn’t get me the book deal that would launch my career, so I continued to work as an attorney and pursued my writing discreetly by attending classes at UCLA and working on my novel on the weekends. It was during this time that I wrote the first drafts of what would eventually become my debut The Taste of Ginger.
In 2009, I began writing the book that was burning inside of me. With each passing year, the desire to share my culture’s complexity and nuance began to boil beneath the surface. But as I worked in corporate America, building a successful career as an entertainment attorney in Hollywood, I was surrounded by stories-but none I could truly relate to. While I’d always been a voracious reader and dabbled in writing, pursuing a legal career was the obvious choice for a young girl seeking stability both for herself and her family. As an immigrant who was born in Toronto, Canada to parents from Gujarat, India, and raised in various states throughout the American Midwest, financial security became the bedrock of my life plan. When I was a young girl, there were only two things I wanted to be when I grew up: a writer and a lawyer. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. Today we’d like to introduce you to Mansi Shah.
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