About the Book

If you are reading this, congratulations—you've been drafted into the multitasking, meltdown-managing, sock-hunting circus of Indian parenting. Snacks will be sacred, bedtimes would be a battleground and humour is going to be your last surviving nerve.

In Snack-shack and the Confessions of a Tired Parent, Aditi peels back the contradictions of modern motherhood with biting honesty and absurdist wit. From postpartum dread to parenting fads, poop logs to philosophically exploring snacks and sleep, this book is a survival guide masquerading as comedy.

Part memoir, part stand-up, and part heartfelt tribute to moms who feel invisible after 8 p.m., this is for every parent trying to ‘do it all’ while quietly losing it in a glass of wine. This book doesn’t hand out advice; it will hand out a mirror and a napkin to wipe your tears of laughter. Because if we are going to mess up parenting anyway, we might as well snack through it.

Praise for the book

'Parenthood, rather, motherhood laid bare. Wrapped in humour like a chocolate covering, it reveals the many struggles, moods, and layers of love. Reading it is both delight and recognition: the relentless pressure of balancing countless opinions, the weight of scrutiny from past mothers and aunts, and the constant challenge posed by the present-day “I-know-best” moms.

A stylistic feat, this work captures the varied moments of the roller coaster that is motherhood, offering them to us through a triumph of literary artistry and composition. It is an excellent, must-read exploration of the angst, the anxieties, and the deep love that define the journey of motherhood—especially within the context of nuclear families.'

- Sherina Joshi, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi

'Reading Snack-Shack and the Confessions of a Tired Parent felt like sitting across from a friend who’s been handed a brick wall and a mic to crack jokes—but on parenting. Especially motherhood, that sacred space in many Asian cultures where humour is seldom tolerated. Not in Aditi Dasgupta’s world, though. She tells the truth with disarming wit, writing of motherhood as a living, breathing absurdity—tender, chaotic, and profoundly human. Her prose moves easily between laughter and ache, between socks and existentialism, between the drudgery of care and the philosophical weight of love.

What I admire most is her refusal to romanticise or despair. Instead, she writes from the middle, the messy, unfiltered middle where modern parenting actually happens. Through sharp wit and deep empathy, she transforms exhaustion into insight, laughter into resistance. In doing so, Aditi reclaims humour as a feminist language and the domestic as a site of both rebellion and grace.

- Manjiri Indurkar, Author of It’s All in Your Head, M and Origami Aai