I think growing up, we always try to make sense of who we are, what we go through, and I grew up in a very religious household. I interpreted what was wrong with me through religious language and I concluded, probably because of a combination of forces around me, that there was something in me that God didn't like or was unhappy with. Since these problems were in large part congenital, that meant that I was doomed from the beginning. I didn't have a chance.

The one thing that's missing from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and I don't imagine we'll see it any time soon, is that there's no memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because of how the memory of 9/11 was used. Memory is a very interesting thing. We very selectively curate our story and then stop when it begins to tell other people's stories and forces us to accept some kind of culpability. One reason I write is that there's not enough Muslims writing, Pakistanis writing, not enough people of faith writing about the complexities of our experiences.

I think that every individual is a microcosm of the culture that they're born into. They reflect the anxieties, insecurities, and strengths of that culture. I'm also American and I reflect on what it's like to be an American in the 21st century.

My initial fear was that Trump would be something in the order of an American fascist, be militaristic and aggressive. My take on it after the first 100 days is that he's dangerous in a different way. Fascists are dangerous because they're competent people. Trump is incompetent. My fear is not just as an American Muslim, although that's part of it, but as an American who believes very strongly in the idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan, transatlantic Western identity. What he's doing to the West and the United States, I don't think the U.S. can recover from this.

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.

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.

When I was growing up, we often heard Islam in the form of a slogan: "Islam is the solution," but no one ever told me that Islam can be a burden... Very few Muslims write about Islam creatively because I don't think we're given permission to. I think that's the bane of modern Islam. It's been reduced to slogans.