Gauri Jayaram’s fictional memoir Wise Enough To Be Foolish is about her heartbreak and bold decisions. She chats with Iknoor Kaur
In 1999 when Gauri Jayaram was holidaying in US on her ex-husband’s money, she proposed to a man via email. She had interacted with the man only eight months before through a matrimonial website and had never met him. Would you call her foolishIJ She calls herself “wise enough to be foolish.”
Her latest book that goes by the same name is a “fictional memoir” of Gauri’s life with the names and number of supporting characters being the only work of fiction in it. “Every single word in the book is the story of my life. I have always felt that fact is stranger than fiction. My initial intention was to write a memoir where every word, incident and character is real. However, I realised that there were too many characters so at some places I summed up two to three characters and made them one. That is why the memoir is fictional. As far as the story is concerned, the incidents and events that happen are all true,” she shared.
The story in the book starts in 1972 and it shares her life “as a fauji brat.”
She said, “My father was in the Air Force and I have written all about my campus life. The experience I had in the cantonment premises influenced my life. Then I moved to Mumbai which was Bombay at that time and my life changed completely.”
The book also explores various shades of Gauri’s life. She explained, “It traces my relationship with my parents, which was not very good. It also explores my other relationships and the heartbreaks that came after that. One of the most important part it covers is the bold decisions I have taken in life like my broken engagement and live-in relationship.” She continued, “Deep within the story the power of a woman is buried. It is my journey of growth and discovery, about me bouncing back and not giving up, the challenges I faced, the crazy choices I made. That is why I end the book with me getting married to my current husband who I hadn’t even seen.”
It wasn’t an easy job for Gauri to put down her life in words. “I think putting the framework of the story was easy but to put down the reality took a lot of courage. In fact, people come and tell me that they are amazed with the level of honesty that I have put into the book. I haven’t edited things. It is all truth from the heart,” she said.
According to Gauri, the title of the book is an apt description of her life. “If somebody asks me to put my life in a few words, this would be it — wise enough to be foolish — because through the years of drama in my life, I think I had become wise enough to do something that people would think is foolish,” she summed up.