As Hollywood continues its steady stream of celebrity memoirs and children’s books, Twinkle Khanna’s latest book, Mrs Funnybones Returns, offers an irreverent take on everyday absurdities in India
Celebrity authorship is hardly a new chapter in global entertainment culture. Hollywood has long treated books as a natural extension of a star’s brand, where fame in film or music becomes career-fuel in publishing. Remember Demi Moore’s confessional memoir (Inside Out, 2019), Drew Barrymore’s collage-like account of adulthood (Wildflower, 2015), and her earlier personal scrapbook (Little Girl Lost, 1990)?
Others have taken this detour into children’s literature: Keira Knightley wrote an eco-adventure for young readers (The Worst Girl in the World, 2024); Natalie Portman penned a gender-balanced retelling of classic fables (Natalie Portman’s Fables, 2020); Kristen Bell co-authored a feel-good picture book about anxiety and connection (The World Needs More Purple People, 2020).
Closer home, Alia Bhatt entered the space with her sustainability-driven book for toddlers (Ed Finds a Home, 2024). The pattern is familiar by now: a star chooses to tell a story, a publisher spots the potential, and the resulting book glides into the world with the smoothness of a well-oiled publicity machine.
What these books rarely deliver is unpredictability. They usually rely on a tested template: personal anecdotes, a sprinkle of vulnerability, some carefully curated life lessons, and an overall tone that reinforces the celebrity’s relatability. It’s a safe formula, and it works well enough that the genre never stops growing and the fans are intrigued and interested.
A disarming lightness of touch
Into this landscape steps Twinkle Khanna, whose sequel Mrs Funnybones Returns (Juggernaut) arrives at a moment when she is also in the news for her chat show Two Much, with Kajol as co-host. Khanna is not new to writing; her earlier works, including Funnybones (2015; her latest is the sequel), have already positioned her as a writer who is both within and gently mocking the celebrity circuit that shapes how famous people speak, publish, posture, and perform.
The columnist-turned-writer turned to fiction with The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad (2016), weaving four stories that explored gender, agency and small-town social structures with an understated narrative style. She followed this with the novel Pyjamas Are Forgiving (2018), set in an Ayurvedic retreat, where she used a tightly contained setting to scrutinise emotional entanglement, ageing, and self-deception. Most recently, Khanna published Welcome to Paradise (2023), a collection of five short stories that revolve around women at different life-stages, grappling with grief, betrayal, loneliness, social pressures and unexpected desire.
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What distinguishes her voice is a lean, self-aware humour: an ability to observe the domestic, the political, and the faintly ridiculous with the same raised eyebrow. It’s a tone that Indian cinema, often self-serious or self-conscious, rarely produces from within its own ranks. In this new instalment, Mrs Funnybones returns as a familiar but refreshed narrator — navigating children, in-laws, menopause, work deadlines, and the general chaos of the nation with unforced wit and a disarming lightness of touch.A variation within the genre
This does not mean the book avoids the familiar tropes of celebrity writing. There are moments when the humour leans on easily recognisable stereotypes, and the tone can feel comfortably within the safe territory of the urban, English-speaking middle class. But the writing does offer an alternative to the polished restraint that dominates celebrity narratives, particularly for women. Khanna’s refusal to adopt a moralising tone is, in itself, a subtle shift in a culture that often expects celebrity women to be role models before they are commentators.
In India, where public female figures are still routinely judged for how they present domesticity, motherhood, marriage, or personal choices, it remains unusual for a woman in the limelight to adopt an openly irreverent voice. Khanna’s approach, therefore, sits in an interesting place: not radical, but resistant to the polished caution that often shapes celebrity communication. Her humour can be light, sometimes predictable, sometimes insightful, but it is unafraid to probe daily hypocrisies, her own included.
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Mrs Funnybones Returns also lands in a publishing market where celebrity books have begun to diversify. Sports stars, influencers, television personalities, chefs, and actors routinely publish titles. Many of these books oscillate between personal branding and storytelling, rarely straying from safe, uplifting narratives. In this context, a book that relies on mild satire stands out because it chooses a slightly different register.
The question, then, is not whether Khanna is the funniest writer or the most daring celebrity author. It is simply this: what does it mean to have a female celebrity voice in India that is humorous without being sentimental, and irreverent without being positioned as rebellion? Her writing occupies a middle space that’s neither radical social critique nor glossy self-celebration. Instead, it works as a commentary on the everyday absurdities: the minor irritations, the cultural rules that make little sense, and the contradictions that shape urban Indian life.
In an era where celebrity-authored books across Hollywood and India are becoming increasingly formulaic, Khanna’s work offers a reminder that humour, even in a modest form, can be a useful tool for navigating public life. Mrs Funnybones Returns is not a disruption of the genre, but a variation within it and one that prioritises wit over inspiration and observation over confession.
