PIZZAZZ PERSONIFIED

With her trademark insouciance and candour, Shobhaa De recalls her encounters with a wide array of personalities

- Shobhaa De

IN maturity, writers often acquire a certain hard-earned insouciance, the kind that cannot be readily taught or mimicked-and God knows Shobhaa De has had a legion of imitators. Across the 75-year-old writer's long and distinguished career, people have tried to copy her style. Journalists have tried and failed to capture the bite and pizzazz of her best columns. Novelists have tried to channel the candour and the optimal salaciousness of her best fictions. It's tough to beat the original, however, and De's latest, a book of loosely structured autobiographical vignettes called Insatiable (published by HarperCollins India), proves that all over again.

In these pages, one finds De meeting a wide array of people, several prominent writers, artists and filmmakers among them. Dinners, professional engagements, or chance encounters, De remains a gifted raconteur and her recollections of these meetings are, as always, quite entertaining. During an online interview, De spoke about the book's gestation period, so to speak. "I've been writing a diary since I was 14," she said. "But it's not really a very rigorous account of everything I see and do, it's more to do with how I feel about things. So, I'd say it was a force of habit and it wasn't really difficult for me to summon the details that you see in the book's anecdotes."