Well who knew it would take longer to name the book than to write it?

Certainly, not me.

Thanks to the excellent collaboration of my publisher Brooke Warner at She Writes Press, I have finally, after at least four major false alarms, titled the book.

When I first began writing this thing I called it A Family Eat Pray Love, knowing it would never be actually called that, although I think my book is great and SHOULD sell 20 million copies so I can buy a town for all my friends to live in with me (it wouldn’t be in Jersey though, sorry Liz). But. you. just. can’t. do. that.

Then I called it Chalo!  This is the Hindi word for “Let’s Go!”, with an understanding of togetherness, as in “here we go together, in good humor, all four of us, with four enormous back-packs, in this tiny tuk-tuk built for two human riders max”.

Many of you remember it as  Relax, Nothing is Under Control, which was the motto I came up with midway through our trip to summarize India travel. This was its name when I landed my red hot NY literary agent. And that name stuck through the glorious year of stacking up rejections from publishers, and then NEARLYNEARLYNEARLY getting a book deal offer from two different publishers, which seemed like it would happen but I had to wait through the Christmas holiday season, when they both fell through last minute due to my lack of a platform.  By the way, if you are reading this, you are currently visiting my PLATFORM.  Did you even KNOW that?

Then, I sat a 10-day Vipassana retreat. More on that in a future post, I promise.

I came home from my meditation retreat and signed with independent, feminist publishing house She Writes Press. I also renamed my book Mother, India. This is a politically complicated, grammatically complicated, otherwise beautiful title. My publisher Brooke said, “My job is to make sure your book sells, so I understand you love your latest title but let’s dig a little deeper.”

SOOOOOOO, after plowing through the book for ‘pull-out quotes’, dreaming night after night of digging through my unconscious to find my title and waking up empty-handed, and writing all sorts of terrible titles such as Monkeys in the Fruit Bowl  and Notes from the Dharma Trail I sent a list of possibilities to Brooke for one last try. At the very bottom of the list, I put it.

And it is….

Drumroll please…..

The Buddha Sat Right Here:

A Family Odyssey in India

In fact, the Buddha sat right here. This is the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya India