Huma Qureshi confesses early on in How We Met that she wasn’t sure about whether or not she should have written this memoir. It’s the story of how she found and later married a white Englishman called Richard. It is, she worries, “unextraordinary and normal and therefore an unimportant story to tell”. Self-chiding she may be, but her anxiety is not entirely misplaced: at a time when public discussion about race and culture is often shrill and self-righteous, at once accusatory and defensive, full of ologies and phobias, the quiet tone of her book – to say nothing of its guarded optimism – is almost shocking.
“Perhaps my story isn’t quite as dramatic as you’d hoped it would be,” Qureshi ponders. “Maybe you were expecting a story of oppression, repression, my personal trauma neatly spilled to fit a familiar-feeling narrative.” Her father was from Lahore, her mother from Uganda; both were graduates, and she grew up in Walsall, where even the most eventful weekend involved nothing more than relatives descending on their house, “cars parked up the road for miles occasionally annoying the white neighbours because of someone’s Mercedes half-blocking a pavement or a drive, the air thick with the smell of kebabs and biryani”.
Qureshi studied at Warwick and then in Paris, but returned home suddenly after her father had a stroke. She finds him unable to speak and tends to him for days and weeks (he eventually died after 18 months in hospital). Thinking of ways in which she can honour him, the journeys and sacrifices he has made, his achievements as a doctor, she starts to listen to her mother and aunts all of whom believe she should be getting married soon. Her dreams had been of independence, big cities, becoming a journalist; now, to feel less broken, to affirm she’s her parents’ child, she agrees to meet a sequence of suitable boys.
They’re anything but. One guy with potential (he liked reading Chekhov’s short stories and watching old episodes of Party of Five) chastised her for not living with her mother. Another looked like “Saddam Hussein in a lemon V-neck sweater. He rushed to tell me I was prettier than he thought I would be, given how old I was, and then, as though it were an afterthought, he mentioned he needed an extension on his visa and oh, could I help?” An outright cad said: “If there was one thing I could change about you, it’d be the way you look.” What makes the situation so galling is the endless enthusiasm of her aunties, one of whom prints out and sends her Arabic prayers: read these seven times a day for three months and you’ll be bound to found someone.
Qureshi sees the humour in these episodes, but she’s mostly attuned to her own hurt. The Sad Girl Years is how she describes the period when she’s living in London and working at the Observer. Friends of hers have places they’ve bought, far better salaries, a sense of direction; she has a room not far from Beckton Sewage Treatment Works, feels undervalued by her bosses, and is slowly being eaten up by grief. At work events, “I frequently felt as though I was looking in from the outside, a moth batting against a window before falling away.” Fearful of messing things up in the office during the day, microwaving baked potatoes alone in the evenings, feeling at once blurry and raw, “My reflection a weird stranger on the Tube”: many readers will recognise their 20-something selves in these passages.
Qureshi says quite a lot about being insufficiently pretty or tall or successful. Her descriptions of married life are rosy: “Richard is a brilliant father. He is patient and loving and he always gets up in the night before me if ever one of the boys wakes up.” More surprising is that her father’s presence is elusive: the only times he feels palpable are when he’s described standing on the landing singing “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”, or coming into the kitchen “from the garden after having mowed the lawn in his vest, smelling like the earth, the fresh air”.
I’m glad that Qureshi seems, via an online dating site, to have found happiness. The latter parts of the book describe how and why Richard, whose grandparents were strict Methodists, converted to Islam even though Qureshi herself rarely attended mosque – and her anxiety about introducing him to her mother. But I wish that she’d discussed in greater depth why her younger self bristled when her parents invoked “our culture”. And about the value – or otherwise – of growing up “learning how to self-edit because it’s what so many of us second-generation types had to do”. These are complex, resonant issues: How We Met offers hints that Qureshi could, in the future, tackle them without pieties or platitudes.
• How We Met: A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures is published by Elliott & Thompson (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
