Unraveling the Threads of Grief, Love, and Womanhood: A Feminist Reading of Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father by Mohua Chinappa (Rupa Publications, 2024)

This book review examines Mohua Chinappa’s epistolary novel, "Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father," as a piece of feminist life writing. It argues that Chinappa employs the letter form to criticise patriarchal systems within the South Asian family. Through addressing her late father, Mohua Chinappa (manu) tells the contradictory binds of daughterly love and resentment. The novel reframes non-public reminiscence and domestic detail not as sentimentality, but as political testimony in opposition to the dismissal of women’s lives. Chinappa’s narrative consciously resists cultural pressures to idealise or demonise the patriarchal figure, rather conserving space for unresolved grief and complex emotional truth. By claiming the right to talk without apology, her writing aligns with a lineage of South Asian feminist confession that transforms personal mourning into an act of defiance against patriarchy. The book ultimately asserts the novel capability of documenting women’s subjective life being difficult to the prescribed norms of feminine power and silence.