The Joy of Parenting

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I feel like we sort of know each other but don't because we've not met physically. But yeah, because you wrote the amazing essay that everybody always talks to me about when they've read it. And I think it just struck a note for all of us. For me, the process of writing is to make other people feel seen and heard. It matters so much. That's why I write and that's the joy of it.

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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