There are so many stories that need to be told and are not being told. We tend to want to put things in boxes: "This is a memoir about a Muslim," or "This is a memoir about a woman or a normal personal." There's a certain story that assumes to be universal. Everyone else is ethnic fiction. Anyone can aspire to universality.

I was raised with this consciousness of being part of this global Muslim community. At the same time, I didn't even know if I wanted to be Muslim. It was this incredibly complicated moment: I just needed to balance these two things where you care about people on some deep level who are my co-religion and are being killed because of their religion. Then, at the same time, I'm like ah, I don't really know if I want this.

The Transportation Security Administration has probably converted more people to Islam than any religious order in the last 100 years. It doesn't matter how you choose to self-identify or even if your religiosity is private; when you get to the airport you know how you're going to be treated based on your name. Possibly also because of the colour of your skin and the colour of your passport.

What I want is to talk about how someone raised Muslim struggles with the same stuff that everyone else theoretically could. Obviously, the particulars are different, but everybody can sympathize with being forced to answer for their identity, the colour of their skin or their religion. A lot of people struggle with mental illness or romance or failed marriages - these are all parts of my own struggle. I read them through the lens of Islam because that's the particular language I grew up in, but the grammar is universal.

Humour is a way of relating and connecting to people, especially when you're a minority or misunderstood. It has the power that other forms of conversations or writing don't have. With all the problems I had, sometimes the only way of coping with it is to make fun of yourself.

If you are an American Muslim, you live in a community that is really struggling to get its feet off the ground. We're a very young community, so to speak, institutionally and otherwise. The way in which we're portrayed it's like we're the empire from Star Wars and the truth is that we'd be lucky to be the Rebel Alliance.

There are three stories that are foundational to the Islamic narrative in which women, and in two of the three cases, single women, are not just part of the story. They're at the very center of the story. Yet, that is not something that you would imagine to be true if you survey the Muslim world from the outside or from the inside. Part of the reason is that we don't really take our text seriously. We don't take our stories seriously. We're almost afraid of thinking complicated thoughts.