Not Another White Girl by Kay Thomas

Not Another White Girl by Kay Thomas

Not Another White Girl is a lyrical memoir that interrogates spirituality, privilege, and belonging through the embodied journey of a white Western woman moving through yoga, travel, marriage, and inheritance.

Set between South London, Singapore, and the pilgrimage town of Rishikesh, the book traces the author's search for meaning at the intersection of modern yoga culture, colonial legacy, and feminine identity. What begins as curiosity about yoga and sound unfolds into a deeper reckoning.

Blending memoir, travel writing, cultural critique, and philosophical reflection, Not Another White Girl explores the tension between devotion and appropriation, faith and performance, service and saviourhood. Alongside intimate accounts of marriage, loneliness, and the quiet erosion of selfhood within expat life, the author reflects on working with migrant labourers in Singapore, studying yoga in India, and encountering teachers, rituals, and lineages that challenge Western assumptions of ownership, authority, and enlightenment.

The narrative also turns inward and backward, examining childhood on a South London council estate, inherited myths of empire, and the language through which race, morality, and power have been quietly normalised. Drawing on family memoirs, yogic philosophy, and lived experience, the book asks how history lodges itself in bodies and speech, and how privilege often reveals itself not through excess, but through the ability not to notice.

Written in a reflective, poetic voice and resisting simple conclusions. Instead, it offers an honest exploration of the contradiction, of being both seeker and beneficiary.

Designed with dyslexia-aware formatting and published by London Yoga Press, this book will appeal to readers of contemporary memoir, yoga philosophy, post-colonial reflection, and women's writing that sits thoughtfully between the personal and the political. It speaks to those drawn to spiritual practice, but unwilling to bypass the harder questions of history, power, and belonging.

Kay Thomas is a writer, paramedic, and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of health, culture, and social justice. She holds degrees in Economics and Paramedic Science, alongside postgraduate qualifications in Social Epidemiology. She has spent her career working across emergency services and community health settings in both local and national government.

She is the founder of London Yoga Press and the author of Not Another White Girl. A reflective memoir exploring spirituality, privilege, and belonging in a globalised world. Kay is a mother of two and lives in Twickenham, where she continues to write and work on the frontline of the NHS.