Finding My Way, by Malala Yousafzai
"I'll never know who I was supposed to be." This is the claim that opens Malala Yousafzai's book, Finding My Way. Malala's life was changed forever at the age of fifteen when she was brutally shot by the Taliban: all of a sudden she was a global icon, recognised everywhere for her bravery and commitment to women's educational rights. Life in the public eye wasn't a path she chose for herself; in fact, as we learn in this book, Malala spent years battling to work out what really made her who she was. The Taliban's attack may have been a 'defining moment' in her life, but in this remarkable memoir, Malala details the years that really formed her: her time at university.
Writing a memoir is no easy feat. How do you put life, in all its fullness and messiness, on a page? How can you condense years into chapters? What should you include, what should you omit, and where should you start and end? Even the most faithful auto-biographer has to make these decisions. A book can never tell a life exactly as it was; to write your life is to fashion it into a new form, an edited-down, thoughtfully crafted representation, meant for an audience. It's your highlight reel of how you want to be seen.
It really interested me, therefore, that Malala chose to set her memoir almost entirely at university. Chapter One begins only days before she sets off to Oxford as a fresher, and the book journeys chronologically through the three years of her degree (plus a little bit afterwards). The Taliban's attack is not in this timeframe: it's only recounted briefly at the very start. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize, similarly, is only mentioned in passing and in retrospect. These events - which we'd surely assume were non-negotiables to be included in a Malala memoir - were presented as the prologue.
This was really effective because by choosing to foreground university - the place where you go your own way and forge your own identity - Malala takes new ownership of her life story. We all know her as the girl the Taliban shot, but this is the definition the public has nailed to her - and who are we to construct an identity on her behalf? Taking us beyond the attack seems to me to be Malala's way of saying no, I get to choose who I am. And at Oxford, she did.
Oxford was the freest Malala had ever been, and she describes her antics with an infectious excitement. She wholeheartedly throws herself into the student lifestyle, signing up for every society at the freshers' fair, trying everything from clubbing to rowing, and frequently chatting into the small hours with her girl friends. What surprised me was her wild streak. She climbs the college rooftops at night, she tries drugs, she sleeps through lectures and misses essay deadlines. This is Malala like we've never seen her before - but it's the human behind the public facade. Her stories are highly entertaining and often funny at her own expense, but they gleam with sincerity.
Whilst the liberty of the student lifestyle is something Malala evidently enjoys, it's also soberingly apparent from this memoir just how restricted she still was. Everywhere she goes she must be accompanied by personal security guards, who even live in her accommodation. Throughout term she maintains a calendar of international political meetings and speeches - not because she chooses to, but because her earnings are paying for her brothers' schooling and her parents' mortgage as well as her own tuition fees. Perhaps most shockingly of all, she is constantly on her guard in case someone photographs her: when a photo of her wearing jeans makes its way to Pakistani social media, she is appallingly berated and harshly criticised for 'betraying' her Pashtun roots. The cultural, political, and financial pressure this young woman faced whilst at university is vast, and her recounts are completely eye-opening.
So much of what Malala goes through is extreme: the pressure is enormous, her trauma is severe, her circumstances are altogether unmatched. And yet one of the things that most struck me about this memoir was its relatability. On a personal level, I'm a recent Cambridge graduate, which meant that many of Malala's observations about Oxford life chimed directly with things that I've seen and known. But in a literary sense, Malala has a real knack for expressing feelings in words, often through beautifully articulate similes. Time and again her figurative language encapsulates precisely how things feel: female companionship after a lifetime of brothers is 'like going to a foreign country and discovering I already knew the language.' The disorientation of being different is 'like all of Oxford was a video game and I was a coding error.' The Taliban's attack, which she can't fully remember, is like 'a glitch in my timeline, the "and" in "before and after".' Her vividness of expression means that as readers, we not only feel for her but with her.
Overall, I found this an insightful, impressive, and profound memoir, from a woman who is somehow even more inspirational than I had realised. Autobiography may be an act of self-fashioning for the public eye, but in this book Malala takes herself down from the pedestal of fame, showing us instead the beautiful messy instability of her navigation through uni. Finding her way was not easy when so many forces were telling her who she was meant to be (her mother, her culture, the press) - so let us not be complicit in assigning Malala a pre-conceived identity. This memoir is an invitation to listen to the candid words of a woman who has decided for herself who she wants to be, and I highly recommend it.
