“I can be in Nepal, or here in New York, and people will come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you make it look so easy,’ ” Gurung says of his career, “but that’s only because I’m not out there saying, ‘This is hard.’ I put up a good front—​that’s how I was raised—but then I thought: Am I fooling people? Shouldn’t I just talk about it?”

Walk Like a Girl (which Viking will publish in May) doesn’t shy away from portraying the truths about what it’s really like to be an independent designer these days. Having launched Prabal Gurung in 2009, at one point, he succeeded in getting himself out of a million dollars in debt. In the near seven years it took to write, Gurung wanted to leave absolutely nothing out. Most harrowingly, that meant discussing the sexual abuse he suffered at school in Nepal when he was 11 years old. As he began writing about it, he thought about how “I can’t be the victim of it, nor can I be captured by what happened in my past,” he says. “Most of all, I owed it to that little kid who somehow had the strength to get through it all.”