How To Be Less Useful
THE JOY OF INEFFICIENCY
“I have done everything right, and I have missed everything.”
A delightful book about reclaiming pleasure in mid-life—a potent mix of self-help and memoir, from one of today’s wittiest, wisest voices.
When did our lives become entirely about efficiency and optimization? Especially as office workers, as parents, as consumers, as exercisers and healthy eaters. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be less useful?
With self-deprecating humor, devastating insight, and bracing honesty, Priyanka Mattoo shares her own journey toward being a less useful human, to investigate why pleasure gets back-burnered in American culture.
Think about what we choose to systematically cut out or overlook as we mature: Solo travel. Dessert. Sweaty dancing. “Pointless” hangs with friends. And then there are the activities that used to be fun and have somehow lost their luster, usually in the decade between 30 and 40: Cooking (ruined by exhaustion). Bad tv (the algorithm). Other humans (bandwidth). Eating at restaurants (Instagram).
Mattoo takes on the zeitgeist, delivering invaluable, laugh-out-loud entertaining life lessons without an ounce of preachiness or pressure. She looks at where pleasure begins, what it serves, how we learn to repress it—in families, in friendships and romantic relationships, in jobs. And she shows us a way back: to identify and accept the things that give us pleasure, then to welcome them into our lives. What if, instead of being useful, we could all learn how to be happier, lighter, more present, more engaged? How to Be Less Useful is refreshing, funny, sparklingly astute, unignorable–a book for the current moment.
AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2026
ABOUT PRIYANKA
Priyanka Mattoo is the author of the upcoming How To Be Less Useful and the memoir Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones .
She was formerly an agent at UTA and WME, as well as Jack Black’s partner at their production company, Electric Dynamite. Priyanka co-founded EARIOS, the women-led podcast network, and co-hosted its critically-acclaimed beauty/wellness podcast, Foxy Browns.
Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture, and The Hairpin, and her film work in festivals from Sundance to Cannes. She was raised in India, England, and Saudi Arabia before moving to the U.S. in high school, and holds degrees in Italian and Law from the University of Michigan.
Priyanka is the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, and her piece How to Extract a Mother’s Rogan Josh Recipe Over Zoom was noted in Best American Food Writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and kids.
Photo by Anais Wade
Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones
A Memoir
From a wry, insightful, and very funny new voice, here is one woman’s peripatetic search for home, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Rome and, finally, to Los Angeles.
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Priyanka Mattoo was born into a wooden house in the Himalayas, as were most of her ancestors. In 1989, however, mounting violence in the region forced Mattoo’s community to flee.
The home into which her family poured their dreams was reduced to a pile of rubble. Mattoo never moved back to her beloved Kashmir—because it no longer existed. She and her family just kept packing and unpacking and moving on. In forty years, Mattoo accumulated thirty-two different addresses, and she chronicles her nomadic existence with wit, wisdom, and an inimitable eye for light within the darkest moments. She takes us from her grandparents’ sprawling home in Srinagar, where her boisterous aunties raced through the halls; to Saudi Arabia, where friendships were gained and lost behind the sandstone walls of a foreigners’ compound. We witness her courtship with a nice Jewish boy, now her husband, and her efforts to replicate her mother’s Rogan Josh recipe via Zoom. And we are with her as she settles into her unlikely new homeland, Los Angeles, where she sets off on what is perhaps her most meaningful journey, that of becoming a writer.
Through these astonishingly poignant and often laugh-out-loud stories, Mattoo has given us an open-hearted, frank, revealing glimpse into a journey of almost constant motion, as well as a journey of self-discovery.
“Riotously funny . . . The Secret Garden meets Nora Ephron . . . A book of enormous heart, humor, and insight that will leave readers wanting more of Priyanka Mattoo’s company.” —BookPage
“It’s wry, touching, warm; it feels like being in the company of your most interesting friend.” —Claire Cameron, Interview magazine
“Distinguished by its sharp wit and beating heart, this is a salve for wanderers of all stripes.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wry and moving.” —Mira Sethi, Wall Street Journal
“I was enchanted by Mattoo’s Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, a remarkably vivid, moving epic of displacement and its aftermath. With brio, insight, and great warmth, this exceptional debut offers, as art can, a lasting home.”
—R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit
“The magic of Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones is that it takes us all over the world but always feels like it could be happening right next door. Priyanka Mattoo’s writing is steady and true and warm but also exquisitely insightful and precise. Her family is now our family. Her stories are a part of us. This book is an absolute treasure.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You
Priyanka Mattoo has recreated the beloved, intoxicating Kashmir of her childhood in this beautiful memoir, and in doing so, renders the place immortal. I would follow Mattoo to the ends of the earth, because she would know what to eat there, and how to make a friend, and then sit me down and tell me a story.”
—Emma Straub, author of This Time Tomorrow
