Sandhya Menon

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sandhya Menon

• Sandhya Menon is the New York Times bestselling author who is well known for her teenage romantic comedies When Dimple Met Rishi (2017), There’s Something about Sweetie (2019), Of Curses and Kisses (2020), etc.

• Menon grew up in India, and at the age of fifteen, while she was in tenth grade, she moved to the United States. She lives with her husband and children; a son and a daughter, in Colorado, a western U.S. state with a mesmerizing scenic view of mountains covered in fog or snow clouds.

• Since childhood, Sandhya was passionate about writing, and it was only in her late twenties that she realized that she wanted to become a professional writer. In an interview, she said,
  

  Since I was very little, yes! I used to write on my clothes and the furniture in my house. Then my parents wised up and bought me a set of notebooks, and the rest is history! I didn’t really consider being a professionalwriter until I was in my late twenties…”

• During her teenagehood, she suffered cultural clashes with her family and had a hard time growing up in two different cultures; Indian and American. During an interview, she shared an experience of how her mother wore sindoor, a red powder along the parting in her hair that showed she was married. Americans frequently stopped them in a mild panic to inform her mother that she was bleeding. As a teenager, Sandhya felt embarrassed and just wanted to fit in and not draw attention to herself.

• Initially, her parents were skeptical about Sandhya’s career choice in the field of writing as they didn’t consider the profession suitable for an Indian girl. In an interview, she said,
  

  I had showed no aptitude whatsoever for biology and had even ran out of the room bawling when my teacher insisted I dissect a fetal pig. She took pity on me and let me write a paper about genetics instead.”

• Around 2003, after dating for about three years,  she got married to her high-school boyfriend.

• Although she die-hard fan of Bollywood films and most of her stories feature lots of kissing, girl power, romance, and charming boys, Sandhya Menon denies being a romantic. In an interview, she said,
  

  I love to write [romance] and read it and watch it in Bollywood movies, but in my personal life I’m much more practical.”

• On 30 May 2017, her debut book, When Dimple Met Rishi, was published by Hachette. The book is about two Indian-American teenagers, Dimple and Rishi, whose parents are trying to arrange their marriage. ‘When Dimple Met Rishi’ gained immense popularity and became the New York Times bestselling book. Later, in 2020, the book was adapted into the Netflix series Mismatched (2020).

• Thereafter, on 22 May 2018, her second book ‘From Twinkle, with Love’ was published by Simon Pulse. Later, she scribbled various other books like There’s Something About Sweetie (2019), As Kismet Would Have It (2019), 10 Things I Hate About Pinky (2020), etc.

  

• Apart from her teenage romantic comedies, she has also written an adult book Make Up Break Up (2021) under the pseudonym Lily Menon. She has chosen to pen down adult fiction novels under a different name because of her widespread audience which could be as young as just eleven years old. In an interview, she said,
  

  The reason I’m making sure to differentiate between my sexy rom-coms and my generally chaste YA romances is because I’ve had readers as young as 11 in my signing lines. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for parents, booksellers, and librarians to be able to tell which one of my books was adult and which was suitable for a YA audience.”

• She has a Facebook group for her adult romance readers, The Swoon Squad.