The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021 happened as Malala Yousafzai was being wheeled into surgery. When she went under, the militants held four provincial capitals, she recalls in her new coming-of-age memoir, Finding My Way. When she came to in the recovery room, they held six.
It’s a striking illustration of the long-term impact of just one act of violence. Nine years after a Talib gunman boarded her school bus, asked for Malala by name, and shot her at point-blank range for her advocacy of girls’ education, she was still undergoing corrective surgeries.
It also speaks of failure. “All those years that I stood on stages while people clapped and told me, through tears, how my story moved them — I had thought it meant that they wouldn’t let this happen to other girls. Only now, as the world sat back and watched while an entire country was handed over to the men who’d tried to kill me, did I realise I was wrong.”
Her profound disgust at the abandonment of Afghan women and girls - used as a rationale for the country’s invasion, cast aside when the cost became too high - makes for some of the strongest passages in the book.
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But this is far from a polemical work. The theme of girls’ education cedes the centre stage to the personal details of her coming-of-age: the freedoms she discovered at the University of Oxford, finding friendship and ultimately love.
We are reminded that although this is a woman who arrived at college already a Nobel Prize winner, and came face-to-face with a picture of herself as a famed former speaker as she tried to join the debating society, we don’t really know Yousafzai.
She makes a break with her image as a quiet and studious girl in traditional dress, portraying herself as the joker of her friend group, who secretly shopped for jeans and T-shirts in defiance of her mother’s preference for shalwar kameez.
There are salacious details for a girl from a Pashtun background who is constantly under the oppressive scrutiny of conservatives back home: trying marijuana, an ill-fated crush on the college bad boy, accidentally eating pork ribs from TGI Friday.
Her homesickness and crippling PTSD underscore the wider damage of the act of violence that sent her into involuntary exile, and endowed her with unsought fame that comes with an appalling downside.
Once, after spotting a picture of herself on Instagram posted by a Pakistani news service and scrolling through the “usual” comments - “bitch,” “whore,” “traitor”, “saying I should be raped, burned, or strangled” - she created a fake account to message a man to ask why he wanted to kill her.
“Those of us in Pakistan know she is a liar and a traitor. Don’t worry, we will send her to hell,” he replied.
It’s a brutal, recurring contrast in the book: the innocuous lives of girls and young women, and the violent hatred they attract.
Conspiracy theorists at home continue to deny that Yousafzai was shot, and conservative opponents depict her as a Western agent bent on destroying morals and tradition. When a surreptitious photograph was taken of her walking home in jeans from rowing practice, it took just hours for it to appear on Urdu-language television. It sparked panicked calls from family in Pakistan, where women can be killed for less serious offences to their male relatives’ honour.
Yousafzai remains tempted to think she could reason around those who hate her. After her shooting all those years ago, the then 15-year-old rehearsed conversations with the Taliban as she lay in her hospital bed, imagining how she would impress them with her knowledge of Islam, and recite to them all the passages of the Koran that support women’s education.
But readers should not expect a book-length discourse on women’s rights. More than anything, the memoir is a paean to the joys of female friendship. It’s at its most vivid when describing life as a schoolgirl in the Swat Valley - trading gossip over mango juice, playing chase and singing in the defiant final hours before the school was shut by the Taliban - or the instant intimacy of Freshers’ Week friends.
Disappointingly, the book does not reflect much engagement with the subject matter of her degree in philosophy, politics and economics. As Yousafzai writes, her social life at college took over somewhat, and her ability to focus on coursework was challenged by the pressure of remaining her family’s primary breadwinner. At times, however, this reader feared the prominence given to trivial dialogue and college high jinks was somewhat unhelpful to the women’s education cause.
Nevertheless, the work is honest and relatable, and no doubt valuable to those millions of girls and young women just like Yousafzai, who tells them they are fine as their imperfect selves, and that they do not need to feel ashamed.
