![]() ![]() ![]() Looking back I think I was in a state of hypervigilance the whole time. If you met the 16-year-old Monica you’d think she was confident, outgoing. I just wanted to have my freedom and that was a source of conflict. My parents didn’t have a car so while other people’s parents would pick them up – so they knew where they were going – I could quite easily lie and get taken home by somebody else. There were a lot of secrets and lies and rows and tension – between my parents and between me and my father. I had to do a lot of sneaking around to go out and go to parties and go drinking and so on. I got a free place at the local private school and I became focused on education and saw university as my way out. We lived in a housing association estate and really, we had no money. My big preoccupation at 16 was getting out. Here, in her Letter to My Younger Self, she talks about growing up in Thatcher’s Britain, and how she owes her career to the Buddha of Suburbia. Now, after some therapy, rest and self-reflection she’s back, reinvigorated, with a new novel, Love Marriage, about two families from different cultures coming together in modern-day Britain. ![]() ![]() More books followed, but 10 years ago she had a crisis of confidence and stopped writing altogether. She didn’t take up writing until she was in her early thirties, when her first novel, Brick Lane was an overnight smash-hit. Born in Dhaka, in what is now Bangladesh, Monica Ali grew up in Bolton before attending Oxford where she studied PPE. ![]()
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