“I have been writing ever since I was a kid. I don’t have a brother or a sister. My parents have always been working. Because of that, I had a lot of time alone,” says writer and director Tahira Kashyap Khurrana on being asked when did the writing bug bite her. Khurrana, who recently released her book The 12 Commandments of Being a Woman, describes the book as a “quirky, fun book, full of wit and humour which comes from a very personal space”.

A fan of Elif Shafak and Haruki Murakami’s works, Kashyap does not describe herself as a voracious reader, but sees writing as “joyful experience”. “The best and the most joyful way of expressing myself was when I wrote. Whether I was angry or sad or happy, whatever my mood was, whatever secrets that would not make it to the world, would find their place in the pages of my diary,” she says.

She adds that she’s gone “pretty much unfiltered” with this one. She quips, “I don’t know what I have not incorporated here. Honestly, I should have filtered the book a bit more.” Khurrana had to revisit a lot of childhood memories which she says was tricky. “Revisiting some experiences were fun, some were not, because at that age and time, the experiences were very intense. So, if I was a late bloomer in terms of being the last in my batch in getting my periods, it was very intense at that time. I was really worried. But all these things in retrospect are funny,” she says.