Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed

Iyer traces her passion for conservation and animal rights activism back two generations in this beautiful debut memoir. In three sections, Iyer directly addresses her grandfather, her father, and finally, readers. Through family lore and public records, she retraces her grandfather’s travels to Burma, where he worked as an engineer for the British colonial government, and the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where he returned to live out Gandhi’s ideals of compassion and self-reliance. She then addresses her father, a social worker who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s and died in the early 2000s. His sensitivity to animal suffering inculcated Iyer with a deep compassion for all living things, and led her to step away from her engineering career to pursue writing and animal rights advocacy. Some of the pieces in this section read like long-form journalism, including one where Iyer visits egg farms in India and sees chickens being slaughtered by people who don’t eat animal products. The strands binding these chapters with the book’s final section, in which Iyer shares her struggles to conceive a child with her husband, can feel tenuous, but she manages to stitch everything together through thoughtful musings on Tamil poetry and Hindu philosophy. This singular personal history edifies as much as it charms. Agent: Anjali Singh, Anjali Singh Literary. (Nov.)