Prachi Gupta is garnering praise for her memoir They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us, an indictment of the model minority stereotype and the toll it took on her Indian American family.
In an interview with CNN Style, she explained that the “they” in the title refers to White America but can also be read to mean Asian American communities “and how many of us self-identify with that myth as a survival strategy, as a means to assimilate and belong.”
Gupta was previously a senior reporter at Jezebel, covered the 2016 election for Cosmopolitan.com, and won a 2020 Writers Guild Award for her investigative essay Stories About My Brother.
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