I was that excited. And then I sat down at my laptop and…froze. It hit me, for the first time, that people now had expectations for the series. And not only that, I felt like people looked to me to represent all Indian-Americans everywhere. There are so few Indian-American authors writing realistic fiction that there’s this enormous pressure to represent every single Indian-American experience in one book — which is, of course, impossible. The emails that hurt the most are the ones that begin, “I’m Indian-American, and I would never do what Dimple/Rishi/their parents did.” When you write for teens, there’s that added responsibility and pressure to do it right, to not cause harm, to make them proud.