There is a photograph somewhere in the 155,000 I recently organized. Two small girls asleep in the back of our rented car in Las Cruces as we drove to Kohls for the first time as parents. This was 2010, and I was not yet sure what I had done.

I have been writing from that place ever since.

My name is Lakshmi Iyer. I’m a Tamil American essayist, memoirist, and author based in southeastern Pennsylvania. My essay collection The Smudged Hyphen was published in 2026.

There is also a documentary, Love Chaos Kin. It follows my family and Katherine Faye, the birth mother of my daughters. That film speaks in more than one voice.

What I write about, here and in the books: what it means to love people whose history you only partially hold. South Asian life in America. Motherhood as it actually arrives, not as promised. The hyphen that doesn’t bridge but smudges, and the work of building a life in that smudge anyway.

If you’re new here, start with the essays. If you want to know what I’m working on, I send a monthly letter from my desk, not a list of announcements. It goes to people who want to read it.