Selective Memory : Stories From My Life

Shobhaa De

Shobha De born 7 January 1948) is an Indian novelist and columnist. She is best known for her depiction of socialites and sex in her works of fiction. At age 17, she began her career model, which lasted for five years. At age 20, she began her career as a journalist, writing "agony aunt" advice columns and features for society magazines. She founded the magazine Stardust at age 23, which included Bollywood interviews, gossip, and photographs. In the 1980s, she contributed to the Sunday magazine section of The Times of India. She has since been a regular columnist for several newspapers. She has also written several popular soaps on television. Ankita Shukla writes for The Times of India in 2016, "unignorable has been Shobhaa De's unabashed description of the womenfolk in her novels. De's women range from traditional, subjugated and marginalized to the extremely modern and liberated women. De's novels take a leaf the urban life and represent realistically an intimate side of urban woman's life, also revealing her plight in the present day society." In 1992, Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times described her as "India's hottest-selling English-language novelist," and how her second novel, Starry Nights (1991), had "a drawing of a nude woman on the front cover," and according to De, "they said it was the first time they’d broken through the ‘F’ barrier, the first time they’d run the F-word without asterisks." Urmee Khan writes for The Guardian in 2007, "Her books are steeped in a lifetime's observation of Bollywood," and "They describe a side of the country that western audiences rarely encounter, her central themes being power, greed, lust and sex." In 2010, De and Penguin Books created the publishing imprint Shobhaa De Books