The Trappings of Life

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After I left that second marriage, I was literally shunned. I would go to events where people wouldn't speak to me. That's horrifying. Reminds of mine who who had grown up with, I feel because they thought I'd left two perfectly good men. You know, one was a doctor and one was a banker. And these were like two good guys. So the cost is my soul and my self confidence and my mental wellbeing. They're his way of making himself feel better about having shouted at me. It's sort of ways against the truth that you can tell.

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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