 Once again, welcome, everyone, to this episode of Launching Leadership with our special guest, Tamima Annam. As we do here at Mount Holyoke, we will begin our program with our land acknowledgement. Mount Holyoke begins each event in the life of the college by acknowledging that those of us in western Massachusetts are occupying the ancestral land of the Nanatuck people. We also acknowledge the neighboring indigenous nations, the Nipmuk and the Wampanoag to the east, the Mohegan and Pequot to the south, the Mohegan to the west, and the Abenaki to the north. We encourage every member of our community to learn about the original inhabitants of the land where they reside. The impact of settler colonization contributed to the displacement, removal, and attempted genocide of indigenous peoples. This land acknowledgement seeks to verbalize Mount Holyoke's commitment to engage in shared responsibility as part of our collective humanity. We urge everyone to participate in action steps identified by indigenous community-based organizations. And with that, we will launch into our conversation. And I want to start by saying how exciting it is to have our special guest here with us today. As you all know probably, I started this launching leadership conversation series in the fall, in September, and shortly thereafter I started getting suggestions from faculty members about who else should be invited. And it was not long before someone, in fact I will say who, Lucas Wilson in the back of the room, sent me an email saying, you should get to Mima Anam. And I said, okay. And then I looked up to Mima and learned more about her and was delighted to find out that she was the author of several books. You're going to hear about that in a minute. But after I learned that, I mentioned to someone else her name who said instantly, I love her books. So now, having read two of them, I can say the same. And we are so delighted that you are able to come. And Mima has joined us all the way from London where she lives for this conversation. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, President Tatum. I'm so honored to be here. Thank you, Professor Wilson. It's incredibly moving and meaningful for me to be here. I've been walking around campus all morning and looking into your beautiful faces. And it means the world to me. It was exactly 30 years ago that I arrived here in the fall of 1993. So there we have it. And I knew. I didn't know that when I invited you, but it's perfect. Yes. Right? It's perfect. So you heard that Mima arrived in 1993. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1997 as an anthropology major, graduating with honors. And then did you go straight into graduate school? I did. Yes. Then she went into a PhD program in anthropology at Harvard where she earned her PhD. And then went on to a MFA in creative writing from Royal Holloway and the University of London. Her debut novel, A Golden Age, was published in 2007 and won the best first book of 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize, which is a big deal. Let me just say that. That's a big deal. And an even bigger deal, maybe, was her book was one of 70 books. One for each of Queen Elizabeth's 70 years as queen. And so of the 70 books, A Golden Age was chosen as one of those 70. Then in 2011, Mima published The Good Muslim, which is a sequel to A Golden Age, which was nominated for a 2011 Man-Asian Literary Prize. Another big deal. A third book, The Bones of Grace, completes what has been called the Bengal Trilogy, all linked to me, Miss Country of Origin, Baladesh. Her most recent book goes in a completely different direction, however. We're going to talk about that. It deals with a very contemporary story about a tech startup and much more. It's called The Startup Wife and was listed by NPR in 2021 as one of the best books of the year and has been nominated for the Quip Prize, which stands for Comedy Women in Print Prize. The winners are going to be announced in April, so we're going to hold a vision of that prize going to Tamima. But Tamima now lives in London, and she is giving a public lecture and a book signing tomorrow. That event is sponsored by Five Colleges, Inc. and the Weissman Center, as well as the Office of the President. But we have kind of a preview into the inside story. I feel like this is the scoop. We're getting the scoop right here. So I'm very excited about having a conversation with you about what I'm calling your intellectual adventure. Thank you, President Tatum. The mission statement of Mount Holyoke College refers to an intellectually adventurous education. And I'm always curious about the intellectual adventure our alums have taken. And yours is certainly evident as an anthropologist, particularly in The Startup Wife, I thought, oh, there's anthropology all over this book, and that you can really see that training manifesting in the storyline. But could you tell us a little bit about how you went from Anthropology major at Mount Holyoke to bestselling author of novels in London? Thank you, President Tatum. I would love to tell you that story, but first I want to tell you about the first time that I arrived here, because that was really my origin story. So I was living in Bangladesh, and I got on a plane, and I flew to London, and I had to wait 11 hours at Heathrow Airport. And then I took another plane, and I flew to New York. And then I took another plane, and I flew, what's that, Hartford, maybe? Yes, Hartford. Yes. I landed in Hartford, Connecticut. Okay. I'd never been to Massachusetts. But I have this accent, because my dad worked for the UN. And when I was from second to fifth grade, we lived in New York City. So the only thing I had was the accent. And I arrived, and then there was an international students welcome committee that came to Hartford Airport to pick me up. And that committee, we arrived maybe a week before everyone got here, they took us to the mall to buy our sheets and our shampoo, because our parents were not there. And they gave us all kinds of orientations. I remember this interesting slide where they talked about deodorant and about how Americans wear deodorant. I think I sort of knew that before, but I thought it was interesting that they felt they should point that out. And I met this Hungarian girl who had arrived from Hungary. And we met yesterday after, I hadn't seen her, after 25 years since we graduated. And we talked about what an incredible kind of privilege it was for us to arrive here and how disoriented we were and how it was such a kind of, such a seminal moment for us. And I don't even think that I realized it at the time, but I was only 17. I had never left home, Bangladesh was miles away. And because we didn't have the internet, I mean email had just started, but I talked to my parents once every two weeks. And that was it for the whole time that I was here. It was these very broken up sort of calls from Bangladesh. This woman with a very heavy accent would call me and say, hello, drunk call from Bangladesh. And then, you know, there would be my parents on the other line. So that was the beginning. And I had many sort of moments of intellectual discovery when I was here. And I think the biggest one, if I'm to kind of summarize it, is as a young woman taking myself seriously because I think I had two very formidable professors who were my advisors. And I really struggled. They were very tough with me. And often I just felt I wanted more warmth or I wanted more coddling. But I didn't get that. I did get, I'm going to take you seriously. And you have to show up and take yourself seriously. And I think that that was what Mount Holyoke gave me from right from the beginning. And of course, being 17, I had no idea what a gift that was. But now that I'm 47, I know what a gift that was. Yes, yes. So, and you shared with me earlier that even though you majored in anthropology, you always knew you wanted to be a writer. Yes. So, I grew up in a house of writers. In fact, when I was in high school, I wanted to be an actress. And my dad was like, that's so impractical. You should be a writer, which tells you everything you need to know about my family. Deeply impractical people who thought writing was the responsible thing to do. So I wanted to be, but I wanted to be a novelist. So my father is a journalist. My grandfather was a political satirist and a politician. There was a lot of nonfiction on our bookshelves. My dad was a kind of like 60s revolutionary Marxist. So there were a lot of like Mao's little red book and a lot of like books about the military industrial complex and phrases that seem antiquated to us now, but at the time were the sort of like clarion calls of the sort of intellectual left and activists. But I decided to become a novelist because I loved reading novels and I wanted to tell a story and it was always what I wanted to do. And I was saying to President Tatum that having a purpose is such a gift, you know, having a goal, it's something I didn't know what I was going to major in, but I knew what I ultimately wanted to do. So I was sort of, I guess you would call it manifesting, but 30 years ago we didn't have that word. So I guess I was dreaming. And I would say that I, and so, yeah, so taking myself seriously and then discovering anthropology, which was a field that was completely unfamiliar to me, I had no idea that such a field existed. They definitely don't teach it at Dhaka University or, you know, there's no word for it. And I had various relatives coming up to me when I would go home for holidays and saying, I heard you're studying horticulture. I heard you're studying, you know, no idea. But that was a huge enlightening moment for me, was when I discovered anthropology and its many gifts. So how has that anthropology informed your writing? I would say, if you want to be a writer, you should take an anthropoclass, not an English class. You should take an English class, I mean you should just read all the time, but so anthropology is about the study of otherness and novels are about being other and writing about otherness. And in order to get inside the minds of other people, to really understand them in a way that makes it so that somebody who is reading your book will also understand them. To tell somebody, to tell a reader just enough so that they feel intimately connected with a character who will never be real, I think that requires a deep understanding of otherness. And most writers are misfits. They feel somehow alienated, whether it's from the country of their birth or from their families or from their cultures. You know, I grew up, I had two Bangladeshi parents who had never left Bangladesh, but because my dad worked for the UN, we lived all over the world and when we would go home, I always felt like I was supposed to be going home. And yet it never quite happened. I never arrived there. And so the experience of otherness is fundamental to my being, but it wasn't until I took those anthropology classes that I really began to think about it as an intellectual problem or question. And it's this kind of deep philosophical and almost kind of spiritual belief in the power of otherness, whether it's your own otherness or whether it's in your experience of the world that I think really sowed the seeds of all of my books. Well, that's interesting. To hear you say that returning home to Bangladesh never really quite felt like you arrived there. And yet the first three books are all deeply connected to that place of origin. So can you talk a little bit about why you started your novels in Bangladesh? Yes, that's a great question. So my parents were revolutionaries in the Bangladesh war. They were teenagers when the war broke out. And their entire lives are scaffolded by that moment in history. They were part of a movement where they were talking about liberating their country. The politics just was deep in their bones. And so when I was growing up and we were living outside of Bangladesh, it's pretty much all they talked about was war stories. This is what happened to us. I found it so exotic and exciting because they weren't just talking about, oh, it was really terrible. They were saying, we made something. They didn't just have a nationalistic project. They had a political project. They were socialists. They wanted equality. They didn't want religious fundamentalism. There was a whole set of values that came with the politics of the 60s for that generation. And so it was really the novel that I felt I had to write first. It was like my inheritance. And I considered that to be an enormous gift because I had the story to tell. That was a kind of urgent story for me, but was also a story that hadn't really been told to a non-Bangladesh audience. There are many wonderful novels in Bangladesh written in Bangladesh about the war. It's pretty much all anybody writes about. But it's not something that people were unfamiliar with. And like you, President Tatum, when you wrote that first book, it was like uttering something that was so kind of urgent to my community but was something that became more of a conversation outside of my community. And so it was the anthropology. I did an oral history project on the Bangladesh war when I was doing my PhD. It was the family stories. You know, I actually, when I sat down to write, I was like, I'm going to write the Bangladesh war in peace. There's going to be like battle scenes and there's going to be a thousand pages long. And in fact, the novel is about a widow and it's looking at the war from the perspective of somebody who wasn't fighting in the war. Her goal is not political. She is an accidental revolutionary. She wants to keep her family together. She wants her children to survive the war. That is her only motivation. And that was the family inheritance that I received, the stories of my grandmother and my parents, the anthropology was like the kind of cultural context and all the hundreds of interviews that I did. And the rest was just, I made it up. So I haven't had the benefit of reading the second two books, right? Because it's a trilogy. But what would you say about, I mean, did you think it was going to be a trilogy when you started? I did. I wanted to write the history of Bangladesh from the war to the present day through the lives of three generations of women in one family. So the first generation is Rihanna. She's a widow. She has two kids. And then the second book is about her daughter. And then the third book is about her granddaughter. And the second book is about the aftermath of war and the trauma of war and how it kind of creates people, generations of people. And then the third book is about a young woman who is trying to find herself being in the shadow of that great historical moment, which is a privilege, as we've talked about, but also can be heavy, a heavy burden. Yeah. And then you switched it up. Yeah, I did. And so the Start Up Wife, which I have read, is a very entertaining book on a lot of levels, but very different. And so it's about the world of startup, but it's also about gender dynamics for sure, sexism and the world of work. Talk a little bit about what led you in that direction. So a few things happened between the end of the third book and when I started writing The Start Up Wife. The first thing is that I'm a writer and I have to have a day job because that's just what you have to do. I mean, you don't always have to do that, but most people do. And my husband started running a tech company. And very unexpectedly, as we were talking about, I thought I was marrying an academic. He invented this thing. He became a CEO. And I joined the board because neither of us knew what we were doing. And he borrowed $10,000 from me. I sold the Italian rights to my first novel for $10,000, which is an extraordinary sum of money. And so I was on the board of the company for 10 years. And I basically was plotting my revenge the whole time because I was sitting in these investment meetings and I was sitting in boardrooms. And I was like, wow, I never knew that the world of work was so unreformed. I had never had a real job. I had just been sitting in the classroom for my entire life. Suddenly, I showed up in an office, a community that we were creating. So it was extremely progressive for a workplace. But nonetheless, when I would be in boardrooms, when I would be on investment pitches, it was like really shocking to me how sexist it still was. And I thought, I'm going to write a novel about this. And that's kind of where it came from. So when that happened, you wrote the book. Very successful. I heard you talking on Terry Gross, right? Fresh Air, about the book. What kind of feedback did you get? I'm wondering about this generation of women reading that book. It was really interesting, actually. So the other thing that happened between the last book and the third book and the fourth book is that I became a mother. I mean, I had already become a mother, but I had two children. And I no longer wanted to write the really, really dark story about basically dead children. When I think about all three books, it's the one thing that kind of ties them together. It's like the loss of children, the death of children. I was like, I can't do that anymore. And I had all these jokes that I had been storing up in my little secret revenge box. And I sent it to my agent and I said, I want to publish this book under a pseudonym. I don't want to publish it under my name because no one will ever take me seriously again. It's a rom-com. It's full of curse words. My mother was truly shocked when she read it, although I know she secretly loved it and found it really naughty and entertaining, but it was not the obedient book that I was supposed to write. And everyone in my life kind of convinced me to publish it under my own name. And what they said to me, I have a wonderful editor who is probably the only black female editor in British publishing. And she said, you have a feminist project. You write about women who are coming into their power in whatever form. And that is part of this project. So it must be published under your name and you need to own that as part of who you are. But it was very complicated because I did have this kind of, I felt almost like a diplomatic responsibility to represent my country. There are not a lot of Bangladeshi writers who get to be published outside of Bangladesh. It's a huge privilege and I don't, I don't want to take it lightly. It was, everything that I thought was going to happen actually happened. It was not the same as when I had published those other three books. I wasn't on stage with the same kind of weight. It was more like, but lots more people read that book. But I think people feel that comedy is apolitical unless it's the kind of sort of arch male political satire comedy like Catch-22 or something. That being like the sort of pinnacle of comedy writing. If you write a story that's about love or about power but you make people laugh, it's harder for people to take that seriously. And so it was an interesting kind of sociological experiment for me in which I agreed with my assumptions. The conclusions were, which is that it wasn't the same and I still feel like, oh, maybe I should have let that book be published under a pseudonym and sort of seen that out and said, okay, this is my alter ego and I'm a rom-com writer here and I'm a very serious novelist here. But anyway, we contain multitudes, right? So it's indeed good to try to embrace that. And I asked you this question earlier. We had a little time to chat before and I'm soon gonna open the floor for everybody else's questions. But when I read the book and I highly recommend it and I'm not giving away any spoilers, I thought this should be a movie. And so, yes, I'm working on adapting it for a TV show. I'm working with another Indian-American woman who's a comedy writer. We have a producer. We don't have a deal, as they say. And actually what I learned, because I've been learning about this world of screenwriting, so if you write a novel and a publisher agrees to publish it, that book will be published. It will be in a bookstore, even if only five people buy the book. You can have an entire career as a screenwriter and have nothing ever be broadcast on screen. People will pay you for scripts, they'll develop things, they'll have ideas, there's a lot of money in that world. So it may never be on screen. However, it is my dream to put Asha on the screen. I feel that she needs to come alive in the form of some talented young actress who we haven't ever seen before. So I'm excited about that. It's a new area for me. And I'm also working on adapting A Golden Age for a feature, a feature film in Bangla, because we watch a lot more movies and with subtitles nowadays. And I never could imagine turning that, even though I wrote the book in English, I couldn't imagine those characters speaking English in a film. But then when I realized I work with a woman who translated my book into Bangla, it's gonna be a Bangla film. It's gonna have a little bit of English. So we're working on that too. That's neat. Well, as it happens, I'm just gonna take this moment to say later this week, another alum, Deborah Martin Chase, will be on campus. She's a film producer. Maybe you could like say. Maybe you could like slip her a copy of her book. We'll have to make sure she sees this video. And she and I did a conversation along with Susan Laurie Parks in the fall. Because she was the producer of, one of the producers of Susan Laurie Parks play Top Dog Underdog on Broadway. Which she'll be here with the producer, as the producer with a film called True Spirit, which will be screened later this week. That's exciting. Such an abundance of riches here. Yes, for sure. But now I promised I was gonna give an opportunity for our students and others, faculty as well, to ask some questions of their own. So let's do that. Ask me anything. We've got one. You're both, and you create your characters. Do you ever like write yourself into them? Or kind of your own experiences? Do you identify with any new characters? That's a great question. I think it's impossible not to put yourself into your characters. And there are characters that you put more of yourself into. And characters that you put less of yourself into. And you can choose, like it would have been very unusual for a woman in Bangladesh in 1971 to listen to Nina Simone. But I love Nina Simone. So I made her listen to this Nina Simone song that I love on a record player. And that was the piece of me. And she is a character that isn't me. She's, you know, she's my grandmother. She's my mother. She's women that I interviewed. But I, but because writing is such a deeply intimate act, I think you have to be willing to put yourself out there in some form and to be extremely vulnerable and to go to all the dark places you're afraid to go to. I think that's the, I think that's the contract. You know, where you say, okay, I want to be a writer, but I have to excavate and I have to mine everything. And it has to be a deeply intimate thing. So you might not see it in a character. This character might be different for me in every way, but I have to feel intimately connected to that person in order to bring them alive. Since the social media and the tech world are kind of a virtual realm that we're already familiar with and books are also a virtual realm, what were some of the challenges you encountered in representing tech and social media in a novel? That's a great question. So I think the challenge is to try to find a way to write about tech that encapsulates both our fear of it and our anxiety and the genuinely dark places that it's taking us while also representing its true connection to ourselves. And I think sometimes when we talk about the ills of social media, we really ignore the sort of compulsion that we feel to participate in it. And the compulsion doesn't just come from our sort of lower selves, like, oh, this is terrible. Now we're all just gonna hate ourselves because we're seeing all these filtered images. It comes from a deep compulsion of connection. And it really does do that. I only got to talk to my parents once every two weeks. And I've been texting them all day, sending them pictures and my kids are at home and we exchange videos. And this is like a connection that is enabled by technology. And so I wanted to take an affectionate but also sort of critical view on that world. So I created a bunch of fake tech startups. The main one being one in which you go to social media to request a ritual. And... This is where the anthropology gets you, yes. That's right. And the idea is that we don't have enough meaning from our social media, but we need rituals. And we're not as religious as we used to be. And I think in the past, every day was like a saint's day or a harvest day or this day or that day. That was the way that we marked the passage of time. And imagine if you went on social media and you said to this app, like, you know, I want a Wednesday ritual. Like it's the middle of the week. I'm really struggling. I wanna do something to push me forward. I don't know, I'm stuck. And then the app is like, okay, well, the Wednesday ritual. And then it has an archive of all of the ways in which that might relate to your life, of all the rituals, all the religious traditions, all the whatever's. And then it says, okay, turn around three times and say something in the mirror and eat cake or I don't know, something. And that creates a moment of connection for people because you are connected to all the other people who are on a Wednesday ritual. And the person who creates this does it because she believes in the importance of connection and community. And then of course it all goes badly wrong because these things always do. They're never just one thing. They represent us. They are manifestations of us. So they are the connection and the joy and the beauty of us. And they are the darkness and the sort of extremism and the self-hating of us too. So I wanted to show both of those things. And I got to make up lots of fake startups, which was really fun. Yes. How do you make the decision from, I know you talked about your family and how writing just started in your family, but how do you make that just from anthropology to actually publish things? Because there's also a lot of fear with that. That's a great question. So as President Tatum was saying, I finished my PhD and I wanted to be a writer and I was like, okay, I can't hide anymore. It's like I'm done as much school as I possibly can. And I really was doing that Anthro degree because I just couldn't face being, I couldn't face the excitement and the fear of actually doing the thing that I had been dreaming of doing. And I was like, okay, I need to write a novel. What should I do? And I thought, ooh, I'll go back to school. Because that's where you learn to do things. I was so institutionalized. But I moved to London because I felt that at the time, South Asian fiction was much more alive and recognized in the United Kingdom than it was here. So I did a one year masters. And I told myself, I would do the masters and then I'd give myself one year. And while I was, I basically, I finished my PhD, but I didn't graduate. I submitted my thesis. I went to do the masters. I came back, I defended my thesis. So the year was sort of like a bit of an in-between year when I still had the sort of plausible deniability that I was still finishing my PhD. And then I said, I'm gonna give myself one year. And if I can get the book published in one year, I'll keep going. Otherwise I'll apply for academic jobs. And the anthro job was my backup. I really didn't want to do it. And I was gonna be like the world's worst anthro professor, but I was gonna do it. And then I was very lucky that I found a publisher in that year. So that's the story. As I was listening to you speak, I remembered that I did not mention that you were also a South Asian Studies major here. Yes, I was. Double major. I was. So that was part of the story too. I was, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Could you talk a little bit more about your decision to write books in English versus Bangla? And sort of the meaning behind the language you write. That's an easy question. My Bangla is terrible. I couldn't write in Bangla. In fact, I was at their, so Bengali culture, if you know any Bengalis, is all about poetry and music. People are obsessed with the arts. Bengalis, they're kind of known for that. So every year in Bangladesh, over the, in the month of February, there is one of the world's biggest book fairs. Okay, it's called Boy Mela. And they take over this part of the university campus and people come and it's like a festival. So I went there and this woman came up to me, young woman, and she was like, are you Thamima Anam? And I was like, yeah. I was like, yeah. I was like, she's gonna like tell me something really, like that I'm so great. And she was like, aren't you ashamed of yourself? Writing books in English? Like, what would your grandfather say? And I respected her, you know, Hootspa. And I had to say to her, you know what? I, this is my, this is my job. I am here to write the story in English. And you can write the story in Bangla. And, you know, there should never only be one story about the war. There should be hundreds of stories. This is our kind of legacy. This is our inheritance. I wrote the book that I was able to write in my own kind of flawed and limited ways with my own vision and my subjective space. And I was trying to reclaim my identity in those books. You know, this is a place that never felt like home to me. But now when I go home, I can, I will always be the girl who wrote that book. And I can claim a stake in that identity and in that period of history that I just sort of romanticized so much because of my parents and because I, it's like this thing that is a mirage in my life. And I got to do that because I wrote that book. So that's a deeply intimate act. It's not about representation, although it sort of ended up becoming that. But in the writing of it, it was not about representation. It was about me trying to reconnect with my roots. So that's a very long answer to your question. My Bangla is terrible. I can barely speak it. And I certainly couldn't hope to write in Bangla. There are so many great, great writers, even contemporary writers in Bangla who, tell that story. I'm sorry to interrupt. There was a hand behind Professor Lawler. So when I get to that hand and then I'm coming to the side of the room. Because I know I've been a little focused on that side. Go for it. Hi, I wanted to ask, Rowan, did you consider yourself a third culture kid? And I noticed that you talked about the aspect of home, like what is home? And so when I'm in like being here in the US, particularly about the like home, or is currently London but like home? Or like, where do you feel like home was or home will ever be? I love that question. So third culture kid was a phrase that was really quite common when I was growing up among expats. So people who were not in their country of birth and that was just kind of the experience of being other, as we were talking about. And you know, for a long time, I was kind of looking for home. I definitely came here and I was like, okay, this is what I'm gonna find myself. And I arrived and I was really, really cold for four years. And I felt, I, you know, I felt lonely when I was here. I was used to, I was a city girl. I couldn't take advantage of all the sort of amazing things like mountain day. I was always kind of shivering in a corner. I felt disconnected from the world. But I felt, I found a lot of intellectual purpose. So in some ways I found home. I found anthropology. I found deep friendships that have continued throughout my life. But I think that, so I was, I came here and I was like, this is not home. And I went home and this is one summer when I went home to Bangladesh. And I felt so alienated that I never unpacked my suitcase the entire summer. I just lived out of my suitcase. I would pull the clothes out and then I would shove them back in. And it just wasn't comfortable in my skin. And I, what I realized, and it took me a really long time, is that in fact, living with discomfort is my identity. Not feeling at home is my home. So I might feel at home in this moment because of all of you and because we're having this experience together. And we're feeling a sense of united and shared purpose. And I would go home to my children and that is deeply home. My husband, my kids, our house. But there is a part of me that is always a little bit uncomfortable because I miss something, you know? I miss my parents or I miss the smell of Bangladesh or I miss, then I'm when I'm in Bangladesh, I'm like, oh my God, what am I doing here? No, I feel uncomfortable. But that is the state of my being. That is why I get to be a writer because I'm always never, I've never arrived and feel like, I'm good. I think that's the end. I'll never write another book when that happens. So I have to kind of enjoy it even though it's kind of a weird place to be. But then as I get older, feeling comfortable with that sense of like, okay, it's always gonna be a little bit, the ground is not always gonna be completely firm under my feet. Yeah. I want to say first thank you for sharing that. I think that's something that deeply resonates with me as like an immigrant kid, first gen kind of thing. But also, like I've always personally described myself as hyphenated and that's the way I describe it. That's great, yeah. Like just this in between, that's where it exists. Sorry, that's not the question though. It's great. You described earlier the act of writing as very intimate but also used the word excavate. And I'm interested in whether you consider your writing process, your personal writing process to be extractive or how you journey through writing. Yes, that's a great question. So did you guys ever read the book or watch the movie The Fault in Your Stars? Okay, so not really my thing, but it's a good story. So John Green who wrote that book, he said he wrote the book in a Starbucks and he would go to the Starbucks in the morning. He would open his computer and he would cry all day and then he would close his computer and he would go home. And that is how he wrote that book. And when I was writing the first three books, I wept constantly. I was finding these, first of all, I was unearthing these terrible stories about the war. The second novel features a kind of story about child abuse in religious institutions, which happened in my family. So every story had this deeply personal and traumatic kind of vein to it. My mother was like, when are you gonna start writing about the family? I was like, never, that's the source. Sorry, don't tell me anything. I will put it in a book. But I think for me, and I know that's true for many writers, you have to be willing to go there. And it's not just the experience of vulnerability, but it's being willing to write things that will make other people uncomfortable, even people that are close to you and in your family. It's a sort of like saying like, this is my contract, like this is what I signed up to do. And if I hide from that, it's never gonna work. You have to go there to the dark places in your soul, in your experience, the dark stories in your family, in your history. You have to be willing to go there. It doesn't work otherwise. It's this weird thing, but it just doesn't work otherwise. You read a book and it doesn't feel real. It doesn't feel authentic. It's because the person didn't like open their laptop and weep all day and then close their laptop. I mean, you know, that's an exaggerated kind of act. But in a way, it's kind of always like that. I guess, sure, yeah, go for it. But then like, I guess, once you put it on paper, it changes the understanding of the experience. How do you deal with letting that go? Yes. So I'll tell you a story. When I was giving birth to my first child 10 years ago, my husband is the child of hippies and so I was like, I'm gonna have a home birth. Okay, famous last words. So I was like, I'm gonna have a home birth. I read all these books. I was like, it's gonna be great. And there's this thing in London, there's a home birth team. They become your midwife and they're sort of in your neighborhood. And I was six months pregnant and the midwife knocked on my door and she said, I have a bad feeling. I'm gonna take your blood pressure. And she took my blood pressure and she was like, you have to go to the hospital and have this baby right now. It was like three months premature. And she saved my life. And I had this very premature child and then because of things, complications from the prematurity, he had an eating disorder and he didn't eat solid food until he was six years old. Which was only three years ago and we had to take him to this hospital in New York which specializes in pediatric feeding disorders. And it was not until I wrote about that experience that I felt that I, it's not that it's over, but something happened when I wrote it that felt like, okay, now I have written this story and I, it can sort of live as a moment in history that I wrote about. It's not in my life. And maybe because he started eating again so that was the end of that experience. But I felt like, wow, I get to process this incredibly deep and traumatic and terrible and hard thing. In this way, I get to do that. Not everybody gets to do that. So I felt that that was so powerful. I don't know, what was your question? Does it feel like it's over, do you mean? Once I've written about it, does it change? Oh, yeah, it completely changes. It changes my experience of that. My relationship to it is completely different now. And I don't know that I would have been able to get to that place if I hadn't written the piece. But in order to write the piece, oh my God, talk about opening your pen for the morning crying all day. That was like a real like waterworks for several months. So I'm a psychologist and as you're speaking. Yes, yes, yes. Oh. You know, as you're speaking. I'm a free therapy right now, people. I'm just thinking about the therapeutic nature. Yes, yes. And often when you're working in counseling, people will encourage you to write in a journal or to write your thoughts. And I'm just hearing that therapeutic experience as you're describing it so eloquently. Absolutely. Yes, and I think it was so powerful for me that I got to do that. And I felt, and it was dangerous. Like I was having these conversations with my husband like should we write about this? Is our son gonna grow up and read this? And how is he gonna feel? But I felt compelled to write the story. And I felt like I had to do it. And it was almost like in the years leading up to writing it, I was like, when am I gonna get to write this down? Because once I do that, it will be different. It won't be the same. I will get to own it or I'll get to control it somehow or I'll get to give it some shape. And so it's incredibly, incredibly powerful. Lots of therapy though, leading up to the writing. I'm looking to the side of the room to see if there are questions. You're gonna let the side down. Look at this. That's two hands over here. There's two waiting over here. Okay, I'm gonna pause. Keep thinking, go for it. So earlier you mentioned the ritual startup. Yes. And even going back to even the therapeutic nature of writing, do you have your own rituals when it comes to the writing process or how do you consult others yourself when it comes to that process? I love that question because before I had children, I would only write in this special notebook with a special pen. And I would write it all in longhand and then I would copy it all down and I'd spend like four hours staring into space and I'd write one sentence and now I just like cannot do that. I wrote the startup wife on the sofa during the pandemic in the 10 minutes here and there that I had the time. And I think that the ritual is just deciding that I was gonna do it despite all the other competing claims to my time and my energy. But writers have incredibly elaborate rituals and most of them are men because they can. They're like, I only write between 4.15 a.m. and 5.25 p.m. and I drink 12 cups of coffee and all brought to me by my wife. Yeah, you hear that a lot. So in that spirit, you know, how do you navigate family dynamics as you're trying to do this? Assuming the 12 cups of coffee are not being brought to you by yourself. No, I mean, can you believe that? Look, I think it's the question which is when I was here, I never asked that question and I feel like maybe you shouldn't ask it because this is your moment to not have to think about that, to just be like interested only in yourself because the experience of being a female in this world or whatever you wanna call yourself, the sense of the roles that we are eventually cast in and I believe that it will be different for your generation than it was for mine. That is a tricky balance. So just forget everything I'm gonna say now. So at some point, and we talked about this, usually it's when you start working, you realize that the myth of equality is a myth and in fact, the experience of life is much more a series of battles that you have to have or difficult conversations and that is going to be your life. It's not like you're gonna say, okay, the feminist, they got us the vote and we have basically, it's fine and I can get promoted and no one's telling me I can't. It's all gonna be fine. It is going to be a series of battles, a series of struggles different for every generation but that is what it is and so in my household we have series of negotiations and challenges and I have my little notebook where I get to write everything down. I'm lucky, I have a husband who is incredibly enthusiastically a part of my creative life and believes that we should live out our sort of creative lives in the most robust and energetic way possible and that is such a gift but it's not without its challenges and many negotiations. Understood, we had a hand back here. So the writing, the nature writing that you're describing is based on very personal, very vulnerable experiences. So I guess my question is how do you isolate yourself from your expectations of that and like how do you feel like you've written it as well as you should have written it because you feel like as writers we're always really critical of our own work so how do you get that space? That's a great question. I would say that every time I publish a book I swear I'm never gonna write another one because I hate it so much. I hate the book, I hate what I wrote, I hate what people think of it, I hate being misunderstood, I want more people to read it, I want everyone to lavish me with praise and tell me I'm the smartest person in the world and I've written the best novel ever and of course that never happens and your fantasy is about what your life is going to be like as a writer and how you're going to be read will never come true because it's like saying, oh I think I'll throw a javelin but then next year I'm gonna be like the Olympic javelin champion. That's what I'm doing. I think putting yourself out there as an artist is very difficult and I always say I'm never gonna do it again because it's too hard and I said too much and I gave too much away and I put too much of my heart into it and I wanted it too much but that's just what it is. I would rather have that than to live a life that was kind of like meh, I go to work, I do my job, I come home, everything's kind of nice. That feels deadly to me, that feels terrifying to me, more scary than not being the writer that I dreamed I was gonna be. So you're living the dream. That's not what it feels like. But I think I want it to be a novelist and I wake up every day and I think oh, I get to be a writer. How amazing that I got this job, how did that happen? And then I think oh, I have terrible imposter syndrome as we all do and I think oh, I'll never write another thing again and my sentences are shit and I'm sorry, am I allowed to say that? You can cut that, right? It's okay. My sentences are terrible. I, you know, that conversation is always going on. But I think when I was here and when I was dreaming of my life as a writer, it was a dream, it was a beautiful dream and probably got to do it because I was here and I got to take myself seriously and I had people in my life who were pushing me and reminding me of who I could be, which leads me to my favorite question, which is all about boldness, right? Sort of stepping out into the life you dreamed about requires a certain kind of boldness. And we have an alumna, Sheila Marcello, who was interviewed and referred to something that I, she used a phrase I really like, which is authentic boldness and I'm gonna read you her definition. She says, when you bring your truest self to the table, you are able to be bold in your own authenticity. So there's lots of evidence, just listening to you, of that kind of authentic boldness in your journey. So I'm wondering if there, you've talked about the way Mount Holyoke helped you take yourself seriously, but if there are other ways or people perhaps who helped you find that kind of authentic boldness. Absolutely, I definitely felt when I was here that I, my exuberance or my ambition or my drive were not something to be feared. And I think that is an enormous privilege that we get to be here and say, okay, I'm gonna be extraordinary. And the person next to you, whether it's your friend or your advisor, is like, yes, that is what I expect. I expect you to go out into the world and be extraordinary. You are not going to live an ordinary life. You are gonna fulfill your ambition, you're gonna fulfill your promise. That's why you're here. And anything less would be an insult to the institution. So I think I had friends who had come from really far away to be here. I had a lot of international student friends, partly because we never had anywhere to go during the holidays. So we would be like in the dorms. They only kept like one dorm open. So that was a real bonding experience, cooking chicken curry in a microwave or I don't know, on a hot plate. I don't know, many disasters in those little dorm kitchenettes. People have come from really far away, women who had arrived here against the odds. Maybe who were like the first people who had ever gone to college in their families. But teachers who expected us to show up and be extraordinary. And not just as like, oh, some of us will be extraordinary and others will just succeed in a kind of like expected way. It was like, that was the baseline. That was the expectation. And I think that is an, and it was everywhere. I saw it, I was in the dining commons today. I really wanted to try out because we didn't have dining commons when I was here. We had our little dorm places. And I saw these two students kind of colliding with each other. Like probably they had seen each other three hours before, but then they were like, hi, oh my God. And then you have this moment of intense connection when you're here where you look into someone's eyes. You're together with them all the time. And it's like you breathe as one person. And that experience is so incredibly powerful because at the same time you are being pushed intellectually and personally. And this kind of expectation of extraordinaryness is everywhere in the air that you breathe. So I think I saw a little bit of that and I thought, oh yeah, still here, still here, yeah, still here. That's great. That's great. Questions? Yes. You talked a little bit about like working in a tech startup and I'm just wondering like coming from like a background of anthropology and what that was like. Yeah, it was great actually because I mean, I have to say anthropology prepared me for life in so many ways. And the way that it prepared me for life the most is that I saw it as a system. I was like, here I am entering into the exotic foreign culture of the workplace that I've never been in. Always dominated by men, usually dominated by white people, really bad jokes, office culture. Office culture is like a deeply sexist culture. It's because it was built in a world in which men, it was actually built during the colonial times in Britain where they built this huge office to manage the paperwork of colonialism and they had all these clerks going in. Before that people didn't keep hours, they didn't have like a clock in, clock out kind of thing. And the men would go to work and the women would stay behind. And so I thought, wow, this is a really interesting culture that is everywhere in the world that I have never witnessed from the inside. And now I'm gonna be the sort of like secret agent of the secret anthropology like mole in the workplace. I found it hugely entertaining and frustrating and kind of sad. But it really lit a fire under me and then I was like, okay, now I can make fun of it. That's great. And write this funny story about a woman who kind of against all odds ends up being this extraordinary sort of inventor. So it was fun. Yeah, I like bringing my secret agent AnthroSelf to most situations. It's like a superpower. Yes. So you talk about your moments of meeting professors encouragement and motivations but have you ever met any challenges that make you question yourself and make you want to sort of back off? And also you talk about you work on this oral project on Bangladesh. I'm also like thinking of applying for PhD. So when I scroll down all the faculty lists and their interest, I'm from China. I see like very few of them working on China. And that makes me think it's China of little significance to the world, to the world outside of China and doesn't make me also insignificant. And also I just can't imagine studying something not of mainstream because here we study like sort of canonical work. And yeah, that just make me kind of like think myself incompetent or unqualified for graduate school. How do you make sense of all? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, first of all, I think that the experience that you're talking about is the experience of being educated in a canon that is unfamiliar to you. And we have certain kinds of texts that we consider to be the sort of foundational texts of Western education. And those are probably a lot of the texts that you're reading. And you're probably not getting as much of probably more now than you would have 30 years ago when I was in college of a wide variety of canonical texts. I mean, I think that I had the experience. I come from a country that is deeply insignificant. It's a tiny country that I felt like no one cared about. And the fact that I was going to base my life's work on it was challenging. And I was like, well, will I ever publish a book if there's not a white character in it? Or if it doesn't have a Western kind of background. And these are all questions, but I think your purpose is one of making your own space. So I think instead of stepping into a space that's already there, you have to first make the space and then step into it. And it's just a different kind of struggle. There's a lot of challenges and a heartache in that struggle, but there's a lot of beauty in that because when you create that space then you can step into the space and other people can step into the space. And that is like a deeply satisfying experience. So good luck. Yeah. I know our time is just about up and then we're going to transition into the more informal portion of our program with some food and good conversation. But I want to close with one last question. Okay. Advice. You've got some students here, I bet. Maybe even a senior or two. Any seniors in the room? Yes. So here they are, eight weeks from graduation. Not that anyone's counting. But what advice do you have to offer? Seniors or not? What do you have to offer for these students a word of advice? So I would say that my advice to you is about disobedience and the power of disobedience. It sometimes looks from the outside like things can't change, like canons can't change, or institutions can't change. But as we've seen, institutions can change and they must change. As you talked about in the revised edition of your book, many things have changed. But you are critiquing the institutions that have remained unequal, that continue to perpetuate the systems of inequality that we have grown accustomed to living with. And Mount Holyoke teaches us to be questionnaires. And I think we must take that spirit of disobedience with us any time that I look back on my life and I don't like to have regrets. It's the times when I hesitated or when I wasn't disobedient enough because it appeared too scary from the outside. So I would say go boldly and disobey. Well, that seems like a great note to end on. Go boldly and disobey. Please join me in thanking our special guest, Tamima Anam. Thank you. Thank you.