The Importance of Being Young

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I feel as if now my life, I can see in the future at some point, you know, there's going to be an end to it. And I feel that but it wasn't like that in my twenties. I was just there doing whatever it was going to go on forever. So we got my hate. If you think that the human brain apparently doesn't sort of fully form until you're 25, 24, you're still making rash decisions. It's shocking. Like, how was I allowed to make financial decisions? Because nothing's bookended. You're not booking.

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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