Lakshmi Iyer

Essayist. Author. Memoirist.

Letters to My Daughters

In 2010, the year my children came home, I wrote them a letter and published it. I have written one every year or two since.

The letters are not advice, or not only that. They put on the page what I cannot get said across a kitchen table: what I hope for them, what I have gotten wrong, what I want them to carry if I am not there to hand it over later.

Fourteen years of them are gathered here, the first from 2010 and the most recent from 2024. They are addressed to my children. I suspect they were always also for me.