Sathnam Sanghera
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If You Don't Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton
Sathnam Sanghera
“Stop laughing so much. You’ll only cry twice as much later”, my mother says. Mum is never more anxious than at a celebration, hovering around us with red chillies to frighten away evil spirits. I hate that I’ve inherited this attitude: sometimes I can feel the end of good things before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy them. But finally I understand why my mother was so fond of the phrase: that’s how life was for her. For years, for every one shot of happy, there would be two shots of sad.
When Sathnam Sanghera was twenty-four years old he made a discovery about his family that would both darken, and illuminate his life. It would set him on a journey into his family’s past: from his father’s harsh life in rural Punjab, to the terrifying early years of his parents’ marriage in England; from his mother’s extraordinary resilience as she brought up her young family in a foreign land, without any knowledge of its language, to the author’s happy memories of his own childhood—his obsessions with George Michael and a desire to have the perfect top knot. And, most affectingly…
