Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands in 1976, attended Wolverhampton Grammar School and graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first class degree in English Language and Literature in 1998.

His weekly Business Life column appears in The Times on Saturdays and he also reviews cars for Management Today magazine. His first book, If You Don’t Know Me By Now, is published by Penguin in Spring 2008 He lives in South London.

This is an exclusive interview with the young writer on the subject of his book.

What made you want to write this book?

The initial impetus was that it was a way for me to tell my family I wasn’t going to have an arranged marriage to a Jat Sikh girl. I spent a decade having arranged marriage meetings – I had more than 20 – and at the same time I was having secret relationships with “unsuitable” girls, and eventually I just got tired of the secrets and the lies. It may seem an odd way of confronting one’s family, but somehow it is easier to be brave when you have an audience – if I didn’t confront my mother in the form of a book, I think I would have chickened out, as I had done on previous occasions.

But as I wrote the book, other reasons cropped up for continuing: the book was a kind of insurance policy – if I was disowned by my family, I would need my friends and colleagues to understand why I was so upset. I wrote it as a tribute to my mother, and as a way of rescuing my father’s and sisters’ experience from oblivion – as mentally ill, unemployed immigrants they don’t really exist in the eyes of society.

I wrote it as an apology to the various girlfriends I have let down. I wrote it as a way of making sense of my slightly surreal life. I wrote it because I was tired of profiling business people and celebrities when I didn’t know anything about my own family. And I wrote it as a way of drawing a line in my story and moving on. But, of course, the irony is that publication requires you return to it repeatedly…

Were you worried about exercising these family demons out in the open?

I didn’t really think about what publication would mean in terms of privacy because I was writing it for private reasons – I was thinking and worrying mainly about my family’s reaction to my relationship situation. I only started worrying about privacy once I had written it. I tackled the problem by giving the manuscript to my family and giving them permission to delete anything they didn’t want mentioned.

At this stage, I was prepared for the book not to be published. But they asked for very little to be changed and taken out. I think this was in part because various siblings had seen bits of what I wrote as I wrote it – some of their reactions are included in the book. It was also because I instinctively edited out stuff – I haven’t mentioned everything that we went through. Far from it. I also think they were cool with it because the account is affectionate and compassionate.

I’m not invading anyone’s privacy in a bad way. I’m very proud of my family’s reaction. The whole process has been good for us: it has made us closer and made our relationships more transparent.

Tell us a bit about the process of writing the book. Was it difficult? Or do you find it easy to concentrate?

It was the hardest thing I have ever done and will probably ever do. I find writing difficult in general – I’m slow, easily distracted, an obsessive re-writer and I hate being alone. But this project had the added problem of being my first book, so I was discovering things about tone and plot and structure as I went along, and, also, the subject matter was extremely emotionally draining.

In addition to the stress of confronting my family – on the day I spilled the beans to my mum I woke up and threw up – there was the stress of discovering that my parent’s marriage had been violent in its early years. It takes decades to absorb and deal with that kind of stuff, but I had to do it in a few months. There was a period of at least 4 weeks when I discovered my mum’s harrowing story that I couldn’t write at all – I just sat around and cried. It was awful.

That was the point at which I left my job at the FT. I couldn’t deal with writing a jokey column at the same time.

I have no interest in repeating the experience, but maybe it won’t be so bad if I write about less personal matters… and they say writing books is like childbirth – you forget about the pain.

How did the book deal come about?

It happened by accident. Mary Mount, an editor at Penguin, asked me out for lunch after she saw a column I’d written in the FT. I met her, she asked whether I wanted to write a novel, I said I had once been on a writing course and that I didn’t – writing fiction seemed lonely, hard, fattening and badly paid – and that was that.

But then we started chatting generally, I whined about some of my personal difficulties, she listened and then she asked whether I had ever considered writing a memoir. I hadn’t. That’s how it all started. Soon after she introduced me to my amazing agent Kates Jones – who sadly passed away a few months ago – and together they helped me shape a book. It wouldn’t have happened without them.

Why do you think Asian men find it so difficult to tell their parents about their mixed race relationships? Why did you?

The desire to have children marry within the same caste and religion has been a powerful element of Asian culture for decades, and it’s a difficult thing to reverse. But I don’t think it is a particularly asian thing – I’ve had emails from Jewish and Cathlic people saying they feel under similar emotional pressure to date within their culture.

I know some Asians have liberal families and it’s not a big issue for everyone, but it was for me. I come from a very large family – I have 54 first cousins – and not one of them had married “out”. Dating a “gori” was talked about as if it was the very worst thing anyone could do.

I’m sure elements of the community disapprove of what I’ve done and written about, but I have no regrets, my family are understanding (though they still want me to marry a sikh girl) and that’s all that matters to me.

Did the book help you get your head around dating women in general?

Yes, it did. I dated both Indian and English women in my twenties and used to make all sorts of sweeping generalisations which, on reflection, had more to do with my own neuroses than them. At one point in the book I go as far as saying “second generation Punjabi women – being the product of patriarchal culture – are either depressingly servile or terrifyingly aggressive… Sikh girls don’t have personalities, they have post-traumatic disorder. They have to fight so hard and so persistently for their independence that they become brutalized by the experience, and even when they have their freedom, they can’t stop fighting.”

There may be some truth in this, as there is in most generalisations, but I can see now that I struggled with Punjabi women, not because they were mad, but because I invariably met them in arranged marriage scenarios, which are often strained and awkward…

I say it in the book, but I think there is something intrinsic to such meetings that makes them stressful. Existing in the grey area between a date and an arranged marriage meeting, you have to act like you’re there because you want to be, even though you are compelled to be there; you have to flirt but at the same time imply no sexual intention whatsoever; you have to reveal things about yourself, without giving too much away (you can’t risk damaging information getting back to your family); and because your ‘date’ has been chosen by someone else, and because so many British Asians are (like me), for want of a better word, schizophrenic, constantly switching between personas to fit into different worlds, you have absolutely no idea what end of the Punjabi spectrum they are coming from, and whether they mean what they say.

They could be anything from a sword-wielding religious Sikh who has never cut their hair or left their house without a chaperone (or pretending to be), to a nymphomaniac alcoholic who is throwing up into your lap after an hour and demanding you move on to China Whites for a boogie.

In short, I think I struggled with Indian girls because I was being forced to meet them by my family, whereas, things took a more natural course elsewhere. Now that obligation has gone – my family still want me to marry a sikh girl, but they would accept anyone – I don’t feel so chippy. Frankly, I’ll take anyone, English, Indian, whatever. The only problem now, of course, is the usual relationship stuff… finding someone who can stand you, finding someone you can stand the sight of, getting your head around the idea of spending your whole life with just one person…

- Profile: Sathnam Sanghera, from bunny to columnist
- www.sathnam.com