How bad can a book be?

Well, lets see. Released at the very height of the #MeToo movement, Nawazuddin Siddiqui's An Ordinary Life was taken off shelves within a week. A short apology was served on Twitter.

"I m apologising 2 every1 who's sentiments r hurt bcz of d chaos around my memoir #AnOrdinaryLife
I hereby regret & decide 2 withdraw my book"

The book gave rise to #MeToo posts and lawsuits and, three years on, a divorce. The entire background of the story results from a lack of discretion and consent in Siddiqui's part before publishing names in his stories in the Relationships segment of his memoir. Much of the memoir has been contested, and it gets the more unusual when you read up on the subsequent events. For instance, when slapped with a defamation lawsuit, he simply stated that he wrote about a different woman with the same name.



Nawazuddin Siddiqui has gained quite a cult-following after a string of iconic roles in Gangs of Wasseypur, Manjhi, The Lunchbox and more recently, Manto and Sacred Games, the Netflix show that took him to iconic heights. However, this book only gave him further notoriety for all the wrong reasons. Nawaz's story is questionable, and sympathy-seeking. Even when he was writing about two-timing, he was still trying hard to win his readers' sympathy.

I believe this book should never have been released, but now that the worst is done, it is a fine example of what not to do when writing a memoir. Everything about it is wrong, the storytelling is shallow and sensational (disguised as humility), the portrayal of women is full of misogyny. To give you a glimpse into the author's mind, he starts discussing his rise to stardom by writing about how easily he picked up a waitress at a cafe in New York for a one-night-stand. This is the kind of writing that seemed befitting for a memoir by the author, editor and God knows how many others involved in the publishing of this book.

Read it at your own risk.