![]() I’m not one thing or the other, I’m both. “That sounds like hyperbole, but actually, I’m not exaggerating this idea that I have to choose to be one thing or the other – it’s existential. It’s taken me a lot of therapy to understand that, for me, that reaction felt like a kind of obliteration of the self,” she added. So, I felt I was being entirely true to who I am. “I understand that it confused people but … my mum’s white, my father’s Bengali, I was born in Dhaka but I’ve lived here all my life. People would ask ‘Are you trying to get away from something?’ To me the question they really seemed to be asking was ‘Are you trying to get away from brown people? Are you trying to get away from your ethnicity?’” Ali said. I remember one critic saying about Untold Story, ‘a curious marriage of author and subject matter’. ![]() I lost my confidence.”Īli said writing about “such a wide variety” of subjects following the publication of Brick Lane “confused people”. … And the depression made me less able to write and so it became this downward spiral. She told the magazine: “Ten years ago I stopped writing. ![]() ![]() Her fourth and most recent novel, Love Marriage, follows a 10-year gap in which Ali said she suffered a “catastrophic” loss of confidence. Ali, who is of Bangladeshi and English heritage, gained national attention in 2003 with her debut novel, Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize and detailed the immigrant milieu of east London. ![]()
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