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Beauty is imperfection: Writer Durjoy Datta

He says the world’s best boyfriend is a myth
COIMBATORE: Durjoy Datta, the romance writer, says the world’s best boyfriend is a myth. “The ‘great’ or the ‘best’ boyfriend doesn’t exist and that’s the point of the entire book. You have to accept people with their imperfections because they might not be imperfections at all. There was something I read in RED, a book by Phamuk, that all imperfection is style. So that’s what my book is all about.”
The author, who was in Coimbatore for the launch of ‘World’s best Boyfriend’, spoke to DC . ‘World’s Best Boyfriend’ is a story about a girl who struggles with weight issues for a really long time and how she copes with it. It’s her story of finally falling in love with herself.
‘World’s best boyfriend’ isn’t really a book based on love story. In fact, the romance bit doesn’t start till the very end of the book. This book is predominantly about two young people battling their demons and moving on in life. Also, the girl in this book is clearly not stereotypically ‘cute’ or ‘beautiful’; in the way we have come to define those words.
Sharing tips on how can one be close to ‘best’ or a good boyfriend in real life, he said, “Not really. If you’re putting up an act it will catch up with you. So the trick is just be yourself.”
Story behind how ‘World Best Boyfriend’ happened: “Quite inadvertently, the characters in at least the first five books of mine were extremely tall and quintessentially beautiful. Though they were written in first person and hence the description came from the main protagonist and the girl’s love interest in the book, I thought I was doing a disservice by propagating conventional beauty.
That’s where the idea for the book originated. I wanted to write about a girl who was struggling with her perception of herself. A girl, who’s not like anyone else, looks a little different, but in all other ways, she’s perfect.
The story and the characters are completely fictional. But I do relate a lot to Aranya. Everyone one of us goes through a phase where we think we aren’t conventionally good looking, and not loved or wanted enough and we try changing ourselves to be noticed and loved, when people might have put us into boxes like fat, dark and ugly and we fight hard to crawl out of there. We have all been there.
On drawing stories from real life: I do draw a lot from real life experiences but not as much as I used to do when I was writing my earlier books. The borrowing has come down substantially!
On choosing romance as genre: I started writing about relationships because that’s the only thing I understood when I was 21 and love, heartbreaks, your friends and your relationships with your siblings and your parents is all what matters.
( Source : dc )
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