FINDING MY WAY

A global activist entwines personal and public trials and tribulations to uncover more complicated and magnificent understandings of both.

The Taliban’s attack on Yousafzai was not only an act of message-sending violence that launched its victim into the epicenter of an international movement. It was also a private experience of trauma for an adolescent girl and her family and friends. In her new book, Yousafzai wrests her narrative back from the public imagination, where she has been both sanctified and vilified, depending on audiences and agendas. Centered on her years as a student at Oxford, the author’s story unfolds from a closed circle of surveillance and high expectations—products partly of her notoriety and partly of her culture—into a tale of deeply relatable human joy and pain. These eventful years include her long-wished-for return to Pakistan, her first love, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the removal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. With so many inflections, the image of Yousafzai as possessing unparalleled confidence, ability, and power rubs against the ostensibly simpler dreams and insecurities of a young woman struggling to balance schoolwork with new friendships, fashion freedom, and midnight adventures. She recounts insecurities and feelings of awkwardness, loneliness, and stress, nudging her reader to consider the fragility of the individuals we hurl onto the pedestals of saintly activism. For Yousafzai, the fate of persecuted girls worldwide seems to hang in the balance of every decision, celebration, and setback, but the nightmares of personal memory and experience demand her attention and care. In her candid attempts to wrestle with both, she positions herself as an authentic, enduring voice not only on girls’ education, but also on topics such as mental health, the institution of marriage, the value of friendship, and the nature of risk and reward.

An earnest, charming, and empathetic memoir from a woman as determined as her younger self.