In 2015, Tufts lecturer Rani Neutill received a message from her cousin, urging her to bring her estranged mother — whose health was rapidly declining — from India to the United States. Neutill, who had not spoken to her mother for a year, suddenly found herself in her mother’s hometown of Kolkata, India after 48 hours of travel, forced to confront a complex and turbulent past while caring for her mother in the present.
What Neutill did not know at the time was that this trip would become the catalyst for her debut novel, “Do You Know How Lucky You Are?”, which details the fraught, intense and emotional relationship between her and her mother. The book was published on Nov. 24, 2025, nearly 10 years after Neutill’s trip to Kolkata, and explores how she and her family are shaped by ancestry and history.
While Neutill began writing fragments of her novel during this trip, she did not know that it would eventually become a memoir. Neutill, who has a Ph.D. in ethnic studies and had primarily published academic essays prior to her memoir, did not have formal training in autobiographical writing.
“The day that I found her, I started writing,” she said. “I had dabbled a little bit in creative nonfiction, but … mostly, I was trained as an academic, and I wanted to be an academic. [But] for some reason, every day after … I would come home to where I was staying … and I would just start writing. I really [didn’t] know what it was.”
While Neutill’s memoir primarily focuses on her relationship with her mother, it also expands into closely related themes such as mental health, immigration and familial ancestry. Neutill, who teaches classes in ethnic and Asian American literature at both Tufts University and Emerson College, said that she was partially inspired to write the novel by her students and hoped to give visibility to topics she believes are underrepresented within the Asian American community.
“A lot of [the book] was talking about the silence around mental illness in at least what I perceive to be Asian American communities, or Asian diaspora,” she said. “I think I wrote it in part for my Asian American students to begin a conversation around mental health, particularly with women.”
“Do You Know How Lucky You Are?” notably breaks from the traditional South Asian narratives of assimilation and embodying the model minority — stories that most often gain visibility and traction within the United States.
“There’s this idea of the model minority Indian family … and my mother was the opposite of that,” Neutill said. “She was widowed. My dad was white. She married outside the race very early on in the ’70s. She was loud. She was mentally ill. … So I just think the story didn’t lend itself to a typical [South Asian American story].”
While Neutill began working on the first fragments of her novel in 2015, the 10-year-long road to publication was filled with many obstacles. Without a Master of Fine Arts or formal training in autobiographical writing, Neutill enrolled in the Memoir Incubator — an MFA-level program at the Boston-based creative writing center GrubStreet — to revise and strengthen her memoir. After completing the program in 2017, she had finished her first full draft and secured an agent the following year. However, the book did not sell. Neutill largely attributes this to memoirs being notoriously difficult to sell to U.S. publishers, particularly those centered on South Asian stories, despite Indian Americans being the second-largest Asian American population in the United States.
“[For] memoirs in general, the mantra [in] the publishing world is that [they don’t] sell unless you have a large social media following. … Everything is driven by TikTok or BookTok [or] Bookstagram,” she said. “I also heard [from agents] this thing about Indian stories not selling — that nobody cares about Indian stories in the U.S.”
Despite these setbacks, Neutill continued revising her memoir and pursuing paths to publication. In 2022, Neutill won $15,000 as a recipient of the Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowships grant. With this grant, Neutill was able to hire an independent editor and new agents in both the U.S. and India. While the book still did not sell in the United States, it sold to HarperCollins India, as was announced by A Suitable Agency in February 2025.
Neutill recently returned from a month-long book tour in India following her memoir’s release, where she attended several events to discuss the book with other notable writers and journalists. This included an event in Bangalore on Dec. 9 with independent journalist Indulekha Aravind and an event in Kolkata on Dec. 22 with writer and poet Karuna Ezara Parikh. Neutill was also one of three featured authors at the Bangalore Literature Festival on Dec. 6 and 7.
Neutill has several upcoming local events scheduled to discuss her book, including a book release party at Spoke Wine Bar in Davis Square on Feb. 1, where she will give a talk and sign copies available to attendees. Neutill will also give a talk at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University on Feb. 26 at 4 p.m., followed by a talk at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts on March 25 at 4 p.m. At the heart of these events are the same questions of familial love, loss, cultural history and generational trauma that she examines in her novel.
“In a lot of ways, the book [explores]: How did my mother become the mother she was? How does that impact a daughter? How did her mother become the mother she was? How [do] these generations of mother-daughter relationships forge who we are? ... What do the specificities of history produce?” she said.
“Do You Know How Lucky You Are?” is currently available through HarperCollins India, with purchasing information within the United States available on Neutill’s website.
