It details her birth in 1933 in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), her 33-year-long acting career, her marriage to Kamal Amrohi, and her death in 1972.

Luiz Vaz of Jaico Publishing House approached Mehta, then a copywriter, to write a biography on Kumari soon after her death in March 1972.

The book is divided into two sections: the first contains six chapters—"Lies", "Birth", "Rise", "Fall", "Pakeezah", and "Death"—and the second, titled "Personal Appraisal", contains three chapters: "How I Got to Know Her", "The Actress", and "The Woman".

It later chronicles Kumari's birth in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) on 1 August 1932, though Mehta wrote a note clarifying that there are some sources that said the year was 1933.

Her father, Master Ali Bux, was an Urdu-language writer and her mother, Iqbal Begum, was a silent film actress and stage dancer.

Kumari won the Filmfare Award for Best Actress for her work in Baiju Bawra (1952), and later that year she married Kamal Amrohi on 14 February.

Her performance as a desperate wife in the 1962 romantic drama Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam is regarded by critics as one of her career's bests, though the film failed at the box office.

Abbas, whom Mehta interviewed for his research, wrote a positive review of the book for the weekly tabloid Blitz in December.

[9] The book's second edition was published by HarperCollins on 10 July 2013 on Amazon Kindle;[10] the paperback version was released on 13 August the same year.

[12] While its original edition was acclaimed by book reviewers, critical reception to Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography was mixed.

Jai Arjun Singh noted it has many grammatical mistakes,[13] and Rasheeda Bhagat of Business Line added: "... a poor caricature of the actress whom Mehta keeps calling, to my great irritation, 'my heroine', through the entire book.

What somewhat redeems this atrocious narrative, in which he largely appears cocky at best and flippant and ignorant at worst, is the shy at honesty in the introduction to the new edition.