Writing is this skill that I’ve honed throughout my life—all throughout school and into my initial working life. I have always been writing. I love storytelling and I always have, so combining those two things—actively using writing as the means by which I tell stories—was something I slowly did throughout my early twenties. It wasn’t so much that I ever woke up one day and realized I wanted to be a writer. It was a slow process of building upon the skill set I already had in order to be able to tell the kinds of stories I so desperately wanted to tell.

What’s your most embarrassing childhood memory?

I’m really sorry to disappoint, but I am very much like my father and have little to no shame. Lots of embarrassing things have happened to me, but I don’t really register them in my long-term memory bank. I think shaking off embarrassing memories might be my superpower.

As a young person, who did you look up to most?

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Old Hollywood. I think some of it was the glamour, because I love glam and I am super femme. But I loved reading about all of these women who learned to drive their own careers in an age where there was so little they could do and so few other women they could look up to. Mary Pickford started her own production company in the nineteen teens. Marilyn Monroe was the first actor to negotiate their contract to have creative control on their projects over the studio, all during the studio system. I was obsessed with Liz Taylor, full stop.

I also loved reading about female artists and scientists. Marie Curie. Frida Kahlo. Artemisia Gentileschi. Ada Lovelace. I loved seeing and reading and learning about women who made something of themselves, particularly during times when they were supposed to retreat away from the public eye and erase themselves into their homes, their husbands, and their families. I was always drawn to the stories of women who maybe had families and husbands and maybe didn’t, but who always found a way to step into the foreground. I’m also Muslim and I loved that the prophet’s first wife, Khadija, was older than him, had a successful mercantile business, and proposed to him. That was the kind of woman I wanted to grow up into as a kid.

What was your favorite thing about school?