The Unforgettable Women of ‘Men Like Ours’

Swap Wisteria Lane or Monterey, California for the prying eyes of Willow Road, and you have Men Like Ours. Out May 12, this darkly funny murder mystery calls to mind the iconic ensembles of Desperate Housewives and Big Little Lies in a South Asian suburb in New Jersey. Author Bindu Bansinath uses the death of neighborhood celebrity Matthew Pillai to tell the story of its residents, the Sharmas, throughout two generations and across two countries. What emerges is a truly unforgettable story about female strength and solidarity.

Men Like Ours 
By Bindu Bansinath
Bloomsbury Publishing; 384 pages

We meet Anita – “a snob” – as a girl in a “nameless town” in India, follow her to New York to marry the much older Ashok Sharma, and then onto domestic life in New Jersey. On Willow Road, she gives birth to Leila, who drives the rest of the story into the present day with the death of Matthew. Mother and daughter are beautiful, smart, vain, and desperate for external validation but unable to give it to each other. Observations and details about both emerge through their memories and the biting criticism of their neighbors:

“For whom is your mummy trying to look so good?’ Karina asked Leila, the next afternoon.
“For herself.”
“Me, I never do a thing for myself. Who has time for vanity?”
Karina pronounced ‘vanity’ as if reciting a swear word.

The neighborhood’s gaze, or at least the threat of it, looms throughout the novel, as the Sharmas’ lives unravel behind closed doors. During a visit from the Division of Youth and Family Services, Bansinath writes,

Devika had opened both garage doors…Hema Rao jogged around her yard with the Dobermans, their tongues hanging heavy and red with heat exhaustion. Jyoti Kaushal watched from her door window in her horrible green dressing down, one hand pressed against her baby bump, a copy of People in the other.

A fallen eyelash clouded Leila’s vision. She blinked away the irritation. When she opened her eyes, the women were nowhere to be seen: no garage doors open; no green nightgowns and gossip magazines; no dogs panting.

The novel is technically a debut, though its author is no amateur. Bansinath is a senior writer for The Cut, where she writes about peptides and immigration with equal poise and sincerity. It is no wonder that her voice in the book is visceral, brutal and darkly funny.

“Men like ours are diabetic. After fifty they have hypertension forever. For years they scrapbook last wills and testaments that leave us at the mercy of their brothers. Men like ours plan their funerals in between routine dental cleanings…Men like ours assume we will outlive them,” she writes in the novel’s opening lines. “But it’s we who don’t survive our men.”

A much later passage about neighbor Karina Dixit’s missing daughter says, “The women made no such promises [of a search party], knowing there was nothing to be done except grieve. They fried their grief in oil and watched the edges bubble and hiss. They warmed it on thavas and pressed their hands to their faces to see if it was hot enough; they pressed their children closer and tightened their curfews, as though they might disappear too.”

Underneath the gossip and joking threats of self-harm – “Kill me off!” Anita regularly threatens her family – is an unflinching look at abuse and the cycle of harm within families. Bansinath shows Anita and Leila in similar incidents at similar stages of life – caught kissing female friends, having their bodies commented on, being touched by older men – such that I had to double check who was narrating which part. It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see Anita perpetuating the same harm that was done to her, like blaming Leila for the attention of older men. That is, until the family breaks the cycle in the novel’s final pages.

Insidiously, the narrative bounces back between the Sharmas’ history and the present investigation into Matthew’s death, and creeps readers toward the conclusion: Matthew was sexually abusing Leila. Mirroring the pattern of this adult man grooming a child, the author develops this painfully slowly. With each of Leila’s chapters, I wished that Matthew would reveal himself already as a good or bad man, and once he did, Bansinath pushed me to really sit with it. We see him lie to Anita, pull her out of school with forged doctor’s notes, force her into overnight hotel stays and even rent a love nest apartment near her home, where they can have privacy. By the time I was wrenched back into the present storyline, I was happy Matthew was dead.

Underneath all of this, Men Like Ours is an undeniable story about female solidarity and transnational community. For all the ladies’ gossiping and fighting, they share an unspoken understanding of the cycle of harm for women and girls – and the very real knowledge that the criminal justice system won’t serve them. We already saw Anita be abused, forced to marry and denied a full education as a young girl; the narrative implies that her Willow Road neighbors have similar stories (so told with a requisite amount of attitude).

“Listen, Anita told her bloody life story all the time. Thought she deserved good karma for the, at best, marginal suffering,” Karina Dixit said. “But did she really have it so difficult?”

“We all came from little means. She came from shit means,” said Devika Gill. “Worse dowry of the lot.”

“Shut up,” Karina said. “Mine was worse.”

And it is with this shared experience that – spoiler alert – the women kill Matthew, who is already in fragile health. The women each steal a portion of his medication as he tries to kidnap Leila for a final time, though aloud they are pretending not to care to intervene. “I have so much ticket drama with the cops”; “I have used up my visa”; and on and on, the women name their excuses for why they can’t get involved with Anita, Leila and Matthew, while quietly draining or pocketing his life-saving meds. No one was willing to call the cops for protection, but neither would they admit their solidarity. Baby steps.

In the end, Men Like Ours is one of my favorite books of 2026 so far. Bansinath writes equal parts humor, tragedy, and thriller, with a cast of unforgettable characters, whom I will miss.