The Incremental Nature of Motherhood

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I didn't understand how hard and draining and exhausting motherhood is. His parents were very controlling, so I ended up being a complete maid son in that house. He showed me some cheese that had gone moldy and saying you should have thrown that cheese away. And why, or why didn't I say to that man? Well, I don't you throw that cheese Away. Throw your own cheese away. Yeah. Handily owned cheese. Some of us have got our own stuff to hand up. But that, you know, that is interesting to me because I can't like knowing you now as you are,. It's such a huge change in you. Yes. Absolutely.

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

'I am my childhood’s wildest dream,’ says Saima Mir. This episode is about the process of getting there, not just the determination and hard work, but also the intangibles: the beliefs, ambitions and understandings that you don’t even know how to articulate, but which hold you up on a decades-long journey to becoming.

In this conversation, the journalist and bestselling novelist talks about shame, failure, the experience of being gossiped about - but also the inner strength and family support that allowed her to reinvent herself after leaving her first two husbands. Saima came late to journalism, but forged a successful career on TV and in print before writing her genre-changing (or will it be genre-defining?) novel, The Khan. Here, she surveys that pathway to this place, and how it built her iconic character, Jia Khan.

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