WHAT DO YOU WANT

She was six months old when her father asked if she wanted to be a doctor. She cried. He asked if she wanted to be a judge. She laughed. Twenty-five years, five failed exams, and one entire life later, no one - not her father, not her mother, not even Ira herself - has ever quite forgiven her for that laugh.

Ira was raised to become a judge before she could speak. Report cards locked in an almirah. Recitations performed for relatives like party tricks. A little sister who learns, at eight years old, exactly what it costs to be the one holding the family together. By the time Ira sits her fifth and final exam, she has forgotten how to answer the simplest question a person can ask her: what do you want to eat?
This is not a story about villains. Ira's parents love her - fiercely, imperfectly, in the only language a frightened young couple ever learned. It's a story about what happens when love and expectation grow so tangled together that a daughter can no longer tell them apart - and what it takes, at twenty-five, to finally pull them apart, one honest sentence at a time.

Spanning a childhood, a collapse, and a marriage chosen rather than arranged, What Do You Want? is a quiet, devastating, ultimately hopeful novel for every eldest daughter who held the house together and never once got asked how she was holding up.

If you've ever answered "whatever you're having" when you meant something else entirely - this book was written for you.