Lisa Ray’s memoir Close to the Bone reads like a sumptuous literary work. It is an important story about isolation rooted in the lack of self worth, about the journey into the heart of darkness, death, bruising relationships and recovery. She is unfailingly kind to the people she writes about and brutally honest about her own failings. Even narrating in excruciating detail how she screamed at a security guard and abused him when he asked her to identify herself at the height of her fame in India. She goes on to recall that surreal moment when tired of constantly being fetishised, she dressed down to grab a coffee anonymously in a cafe and a boy noticed her and said she was alright but no Lisa Ray. The push and pull between the external gloss and the inner depletion, her struggle to cope with the painful reality of her mother’s incapacitation in an accident, her search for meaning and self definition in art, in relationships, reading, writing and travelling flesh out a woman who is a seeker, a student, someone who knew there was something more to life than was visible and available.
Her deep dive into spirituality and consequent ability to weave together the many threads of her life story into a final mission statement, “I am worthy,” is both empowering and a revelation because it tells us how much women struggle with the idea of loving themselves just the way they are.
Deep in their marrow are buried memories of voices that have made them feel less, belittled their strengths, robbed them of their agency, forced them to conform, to starve their bodies and spirits to win approval. Not all women, learn like Lisa at some point that they are life giving goddesses who need nobody’s permission to love themselves or to acknowledge their own beauty and power. But this story reassures that it is possible to one day find ease within your skin. To come home to yourself and manifest a life that feels like it was made just for you and you for it.