The Mumbai poet’s debut collection, A Little Bit in Love, A Lot in Pain, is quietly becoming the most emotionally honest thing you’ll read this year.
There is a particular kind of woman you have met a hundred times and probably never noticed. She is at the dinner table, at the party, in the meeting room. She is listening more than she is speaking. She is feeling more than she is showing. She is, in the most invisible and devastating way, completely and utterly in love with someone who may not even know she exists. You have been her. Most of us have.
Toolika Mishra Wadekar has written a book for her. For us.
A Little Bit in Love, A Lot in Pain, the debut poetry collection from the Mumbai-based writer, is the kind of book that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need to. It finds you in the quiet moments, 2 a.m. scrolling, a Sunday that feels heavier than it should, the morning after a conversation you keep replaying. It sits down beside you and says: I know. Me too.
And the moment it does, you cannot put it down.
The Woman Behind the Words
Toolika is not who you might expect a poet to be. She works in marketing, navigating the fast, strategic world of brands and entertainment with the kind of precision that has nothing to do with feelings and everything to do with impact. She also studied psychology, drawn not to the clinical but to the deeply human: not what people do, but why they feel. It is a combination that gives her poetry a texture unlike anything currently on shelves. It is warm but never saccharine. Observant but never cold. It reads like someone who has spent years watching the world and finally decided the world deserved to hear what she saw.
She dedicated this collection to her younger self, and that dedication alone has been quietly breaking the internet among the women who have found it.
She writes to the girl who loved from the far corner of every room. Who swallowed her words because she feared they were too much. Who stayed up replaying conversations that never happened. Who cried softly so no one would hear. Who believed that loving deeply was a flaw she needed to apologise for, rather than a gift she had been given.
If you felt something reading that, you are exactly who this book was written for
The Line That Will Live in Your Head
There is one line in the dedication that readers keep screenshotting, sharing, sending to the group chat without explanation because no explanation is needed:
“A girl who never quite knew how to say I like you, but who somehow always knew how to write I miss you.”
It is the kind of sentence that makes you set the book down for a moment. Not because it is difficult, but because it is so precise, so perfectly observed, that it feels like something that was always true about you and you simply never had the words for it until now. That is Toolika’s gift. She finds the grammar of feelings that most of us have never been able to name.
Why This Book, Why Now
We are living through a strange paradox. Emotion has never been more visible, splashed across feeds and stories and comment sections, performed and packaged and posted before it is even fully felt. And yet the woman who feels deeply and quietly, who processes alone before she speaks, who would rather write it down than say it out loud, remains almost entirely unrepresented.
Toolika writes for her without apology.
The collection moves through longing, silence, and survival, and none of them are what you expect. The longing is not passive. It has the specific, unbearable weight of the moment just before you say something you cannot take back. The silence is not peaceful. It is the silence of someone who has decided, again, not to speak. And the survival is not triumphant. It is quiet and daily and real. It is waking up and choosing to feel again, even after feeling has cost you everything.
A Debut That Reads Like a Life’s Work
What is most striking about A Little Bit in Love, A Lot in Pain is that it does not read like a first book. It reads like the work of someone who has been writing her whole life, because in every way that matters, she has. Every feeling she suppressed was a first draft. Every silent night was a revision. Every heartbreak was the manuscript slowly, painfully finding its form.
The girl who used to sit quietly in the corner of the room has written her book. And it turns out she had more to say than anyone in the room ever knew.
Go find it. Read it alone. You will feel significantly less alone for having done so.
TITLE: A little bit in love, a lot in pain
BOOK: https://amazon.in/dp/9375104893
INSTAGRAM: the.t.podd
