A couple of years ago, when she was doing her MA in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, 30-year-old writer Rosalyn D’Mello spoke to her professor about writing about the body and the reactions it can draw from people around you, especially family. "If you are going to worry about what your parents are going to say, you have no business writing," he told her. Still young and raw, D'Mello at the time was just starting to discover her style and had only ventured into the territory of erotica. Her book, A Handbook For My Lover, that’s releasing next month, is a non-fiction erotic memoir that continues that trend. "Somehow, what he said stayed with me. It made me feel like I had the courage to be fearless about writing," she smiles. Also the idea of women and "irrepressibility", a word she uses deliberately. Most of her favourite women authors, she shares, are women who can't be repressed. Women who are fearless when it comes to writing about themselves. "They write about shame, they write about their lust and their sheer wanton desire for a man. I say that it’s weirdly empowering if you are able to do that. On the one hand, it is like an act of stripping — internally and externally in front of an audience. Yet, it doesn’t make you feel victimised because you are performing and making a narrative of everything that you experience daily," she explains. "Once you start to document, you have control over your experiences and that control is what makes you empowered." She maintains that erotic writing is not about pornography but about taking charge of the narrative. "For me, that is deeply fascinating."