Review of Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai – Growing Up in Public | books

toIn her Birmingham hospital bed, in the weeks after she was shot in the head by a Taliban killer, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was imagining the conversation she would have with the Taliban leadership. “If they would only sit with me…I could reason with them and convince them to end the era of misogyny and violence,” she wrote in her new memoir..

Malala kept a notebook next to her bed, full of rhetorical strategies and talking points — the names of journalists who might be able to broker a meeting with the Taliban, Quranic verses she could cite to show that girls He does She has the right to an education in Islam, and the things she can say to establish her credentials as a God-fearing Muslim. Of course, that conversation never happened. Much later, after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, it made her wince when she recalled her naive belief that the Taliban would one day listen to her.

What happened is that Malala grew up little by little. Her story has been told before, most notably in I Am Malala, It was co-written by Christina Lamb and published in 2013, the year before she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Finding My Way captures the story of her life as she navigates young adulthood.

In Birmingham, she is largely ignored by her high school classmates, but Malala studies hard and wins a place at Oxford – a dream come true. She joins the rowing team, signs up for a slew of clubs, and stays up dancing late with her roommates, all while keeping up with international speaking commitments that pay her parents’ mortgage. She has little time to do any reading, let alone turn in assignments on time. Her teachers send her increasingly strict messages.

But she finds time to fall in love. The centerpiece of the book is the story of Malala’s courtship with Asir, a handsome cricket executive from Lahore. When he develops a passing interest in astronomy, he buys her a telescope. When she told a national magazine that she was skeptical about the institution of marriage, he phoned her angry parents to support her and talk to them. It takes Malala a long time to be sure she is ready for marriage, but when she finally decides, it brings her “deep happiness.”

Good for her. The clarity of Malala’s childhood conviction that girls have an inalienable right to education is what propelled her onto the international stage, but it was also what deprived her for a time of her ability to define herself. When she woke up from a coma after being attacked, her face was half paralyzed, but what was more disturbing was that her true identity, as a troublesome colleague and a nagging sister, had been imprinted by the narrative of a “mythical heroine, virtuous and obedient” – “a serious, shy, upholstered flower girl who was forced to speak out when the Taliban confiscated her books.” It was impossible holiness. Meanwhile, an army of online trolls finds her every move reprehensiblely un-Islamic.

“Finding My Way” sees Malala reclaiming her own life story – rejecting the constraints and contradictions of a sheltered childhood and sudden fame. In Oxford, she allowed her security guards to climb Lady Margaret Hall’s bell tower. She celebrates Galentine’s Day with her friends. Find a therapist to treat PTSD. She falls seriously behind in her work, and then slowly acquires more diligent habits. She even goes through a phase of constantly ordering TGI Fridays ribs, not realizing they’re pork (oops). It’s all education.

These days, on her Instagram Stories, you can find Malala wearing a bucket hat, bobbing her head alongside Oasis as they perform Roll With It, while Asser smiles alongside her. Working to educate girls around the world is still a part of her life, but so are the more everyday joys of life: she owns an exotic pen collection that she’s proud of, takes pride in her average golf swing, and is trying to learn how to swim. It turns out that being a student of life can be a worthwhile career, too.