Twenty years ago Priyanka Mattoo decided to leave Michigan for California. At the time, she faced two dilemmas: She was in love with someone who didn’t reciprocate her feelings and she had just graduated from law school but no longer wished to practice law. So Mattoo decided to “tag along” with a friend to Los Angeles.
“L.A. has made me into who I am,” Mattoo said during a Zoom call from her home.
“A close friends’ circle, spending every night at a different party, building a family, diving into the food scene — whatever I wanted was available to me here without the churn and expense that other cities [at the time] had.” A former talent agent at UTA and WME, Mattoo once represented emerging comedy writers and actors while acclimating to the “culture” of walking red carpets and attending afterparties. The story of why Mattoo quit her job as an agent to pursue a career in writing has as many twists and turns as her literary debut, the memoir “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones” — a Kashmiri phrase meaning something “so rare and precious that the listener should question its existence.
” “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones,” out Tuesday, chronicles Mattoo’s journey across five countries and 32 homes. Mattoo opens with her house in her native Kashmir being destroyed. She and her family were refugees who split time between India and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, due to the ongoing Kashmir insurgency.
One night in Riyadh, 12-year-old Mattoo and her family received news.
