"When the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Malala Yousafzai was fifteen, she was shot by a member of the Taliban for advocating for girls' education-an event that, as she writes in " Finding My Way," her new memoir, thrust her into "an unfamiliar, unbidden life." For years to come, she would be gripped by "the feeling that a giant hand plucked me out of one story and dropped me into an entirely new one.""
"Reading it, I was reminded of mothers I've seen in patriarchal societies around the world-women who silently bear domestic burdens and subjugation by their husbands, while equipping their daughters with the skills and determination they need to break free. Even though Sinclair's father forbade her from expressing herself, her mother quietly gave her poetry books, teaching her the liberating power of literature."
At fifteen, Malala Yousafzai was shot by a Taliban member for advocating girls' education, an event that abruptly changed her life. The incident created a persistent feeling of being plucked from one story and dropped into another. The aftermath involved reconciling a private sense of being an awkward teenager with a public image as a mythical, virtuous heroine. Her mother embodies simultaneous generosity and strictness, bravery and conservatism, and wields strong influence. Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon depicts escape from a rigid Rastafarian upbringing in Jamaica and a mother who quietly enables literary freedom. Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters focuses on unseen young women of the Beat Generation and childhood navigation under overbearing maternal influences.
Read at The New Yorker
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