NEW DELHI : Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi said her forthcoming memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, is a personal account of her life in India, not a political book, and that she wanted to portray her family honestly, as people she knew and loved.
In an article published in The Hindu ahead of the book's release, Gandhi said the memoir traces her journey from a small Italian town to India, the country she eventually came to call home, and reflects on the love, loss and sense of duty that shaped her life.
"For most of my life, I kept my inner world to myself. Even after grief pulled me into politics, I held on to whatever privacy I could, and writing openly about my life felt almost unthinkable.
Only after stepping back from the daily churn of public life could I see my own story clearly," Gandhi said.
"When I did look back, one thread ran through all of it: love, and the loyalty that grows from it. It all began in England, where a 19-year-old woman from a small Italian town met a young Indian student.
It carried me into a new country and a new family, into a deep bond with my mother-in-law, and through the years of raising our children," she wrote about how 'Belonging' came to be.
"It also carried me through the unbearable, when I lost first my mother-in-law and then my husband to violence," she added.
Gandhi said what remained to sustain her was her love for her husband and for India, the country where she felt she truly belonged.
It also came with a sense of duty strong enough to lead her into public life, against every instinct she had, Gandhi said.
"This is not a political book. It is a personal one. Much has been written about my family, but rarely with real insight into who they were, their motivations, their struggles, their very human flaws.
Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi poses for a picture with her upcoming memoir; (R) Sonia with her late husband and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
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