In 2017, Prachi Gupta’s brother, Yush, died from a pulmonary embolism after a risky limb-lengthening surgery in Italy. Her brother’s death was the most catastrophic and traumatic event of her life. Gupta believes Yush sought out surgery to be taller as part of a quest to fulfill white America’s ideal of masculinity.
As she navigated that complex grief, trying to understand his motivations for pursuing the surgery, Gupta wrote an essay about the complex pressures that led to her brother’s death. That essay won a 2020 Writers Guild Award and led Gupta (A&S ’09, CBA ’09) to write her memoir “They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies that Raised Us,” which debuted last year and which Amazon and Audible named one of the best memoirs of the year.
“I was not expecting it to resonate with as many people as it did,” she says.
Gupta, whose parents are from India, grew up in Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia suburbs with what she calls toxic patriarchy — her father once struck her over the head with a plate because she disagreed with him. The turbulence inside her home and the emotional toll of assimilation were destabilizing for Gupta. She felt she could never be Indian enough for her father or American enough for her friends.
By Lauren Davidson