I found new chapters are always there for the taking

Life’s twists and turns come with every age, says novelist Preethi Nair, but the best things can surface when the worst things happen even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time...

- Preethi Nair

In my twenties, bouncing back was never a question. The confidence that comes with youth made me feel I could handle any setback, find the lesson, and turn that straw into gold. As the decades have passed, (I’m now in my fifties) that straw has turned into a haystack and finding my way back through it all has been far more complex than I could have ever imagined.

At 28, I was made redundant from my job as a management consultant and was overcome by shock and shame in equal measure. I was still living with my parents at the time, and not wanting to worry them I decided to pretend to go to work every day until I came up with a plan.

So, every day, I’d put on a suit and wave goodbye to them only to walk past my office and turn left into the library. I did this for eight months – yes, you read that right, eight months. I felt remorse for my deception, but I told myself everything would work out. Having time to really think about what I wanted to do next really helped me and I took the redundancy as a sign that I should follow my dream of becoming a writer.

While at my new office – “the library” – I started working on a book idea in earnest. I came up with an idea about a young Indian woman, raised to fulfil her parents’ dreams of respectability, but who sets off to make her own destiny and disrupts the whole family.

I sent off my manuscript, but it was rejected by every single publisher. Undeterred and driven by a belief that there was an audience for my novel, I decided to self-publish it, telling myself once it became a success, I’d then sell it to a big publisher. I was so confident, that I wrote a list of the future me (now referred to as “manifesting”), and it went something like this: “I’m a bestselling novelist; my books are translated internationally; film rights have been bought…”