Family Life and Mental Illness in Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom

Author

Dr. Abhinandan G. Pakhmode

Abstract

 Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom (2012) is a significant contemporary Indian novel that examines the intimate relationship between family life and mental illness. Set primarily within a small middle-class Catholic household in Mahim, Mumbai, the novel narrates the experiences of a family living with Em, Imelda Mendes, a mother affected by severe mental illness and recurrent suicidal behaviour. Through the unnamed son’s fragmented memories, Pinto explores not only the psychological suffering of the individual but also the emotional, social, and practical consequences of mental illness for the entire family. This paper examines illness-narrative perspectives and demonstrates that Pinto presents family not as a perfect or harmonious institution but as a continuously negotiated space in which love and suffering coexist. Ultimately, the novel humanizes mental illness and proposes storytelling itself as an act of care and remembrance.

Keywords

Jerry Pinto, Em and the Big Hoom, mental illness, bipolar disorder, family, caregiving, stigma, motherhood, memory, Indian literature

Full Text:

Download Paper PDF

References

1. Das, A., & Samanta, N. (2026). Archiving Em: Care, counter-archive and the mad mother in Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom. Literariness Journal, 1(3). https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.101
2. Basu, P. (2023). Society and mental illness: A psychoanalytic exploration into the memory of a bipolar woman. International Journal of English and Comparative Literary Studies, 3(6), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.47631/ijecls.v3i6.544
3. Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. University of Chicago Press.
4. Mathews, A. P. (2026). The feeling child: A study of Precarity in Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom. The Voice of Creative Research, 8(1), 13–20. https://doi.org/10.53032/tvcr/PP/2026.v8n1.03
5. Pinto, J. (2012). Em and the Big Hoom. Random House India.
6. Thomas, S. (2014, May 3). Em and the Big Hoomby Jerry Pinto – family life and mental turmoil in Bombay. The Guardian.
7. Udipikar, P. (2024). Research paper on challenges of caregivers of mentally ill persons: A study of Em and the Big Hoom. International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology, 11(5), 1018–1020.