Goodreads asked Sonali Dev:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Sonali Dev The Bollywood Bride, which comes out this month, was inspired by one of those whispered stories from your childhood that elders share when they think you aren’t listening but that you soak up. One of my father’s boss’s wives became severely mentally ill in childbirth. While doing research for the book, I figured her postpartum depression had probably triggered a severe form of psychosis that she didn’t get the right treatment for. But the story I heard as a child was how the poor lady went ‘crazy’ in childbirth and was locked up in an asylum for the rest of her life.
I never met their daughter, but I always wondered what it must be like to have been the cause of losing your mother that way. That combined with this homogenous world I grew up in, where any child outside of the norm was openly regarded as a freak was where I think The Bollywood Bride took root.

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