My Story by Kamala Das
Published 1976 · 219 pages · 55,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is My Story to read?
My Story scores 21 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Direct, personal vocabulary. Some Malayalam and cultural terms. No literary artifice.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- Concrete autobiographical detail. Emotional truth conveyed through incident, not theory.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- A full life compressed into a short memoir. Dense with incident and feeling.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Largely chronological autobiography. Some deliberate blurring of fact and fiction.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- The body as the central symbol — site of desire, violence, and liberation.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Confessional and direct. Das writes without protective irony.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- Autobiographical narrative moves through episodes. No sustained mystery.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Chronological memoir with digressions. Simple structure.
How My Story is regarded
My Story holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.