I’m standing in the shed where Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai smoked her first bong. This isn’t a joke—it’s a real story. “My life changed forever,” Yousafzai says with sadness as we look at the run-down structure. “Everything changed forever after that night.”
The shed is hidden behind Lady Margaret Hall, away from the busy life of Oxford’s colleges. You need to know where to look for it. Yousafzai guides me through courtyards and into a secluded garden. Inside, we find dusty pint glasses, cobwebs, and board games with missing pieces.
We’re meeting on a sunny summer afternoon before the release of her memoir, Finding My Way, which follows her 2013 bestseller I Am Malala. Wearing a blue shirt, jeans, and a headscarf, Yousafzai is accompanied at a distance by two bodyguards. The college is quiet during summer break, and the few students around don’t pay her any attention as we walk across the grass.
This isn’t our first interview. Our last conversation led to days of negative headlines for Yousafzai back in her home country of Pakistan. As we stand by the bong shed, I worry this second interview might cause similar trouble.
In 2021, I profiled a 23-year-old Yousafzai for the cover of British Vogue. The world’s youngest Nobel laureate—she won the award at 17 for her advocacy for girls’ education—had just graduated from university and was starting her adult life.
Yousafzai began her activism at age 11. Her father, Ziauddin, is an education activist, and she followed his lead, writing a blog for BBC Urdu about her life as the Taliban closed girls’ schools in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where she lived. At 15, a Taliban gunman shot her in the head on her school bus. She was flown to the UK for treatment, made a remarkable recovery, and settled with her family in Birmingham, where she attended secondary school while continuing to campaign for girls’ education worldwide.
When I met Yousafzai in April 2021, she had just earned a 2.1 degree from Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics and signed a deal with Apple TV+ to develop and produce her own TV shows and films. (That deal has since ended.) We spoke at a London hotel and then walked through St James’s Park during the COVID era. When I asked if she had a romantic partner, she seemed taken aback. “I’ve met some great people, and I hope I find someone,” she stammered, clearly embarrassed.
Later, she reflected on marriage. “I still don’t understand why people have to get married,” she told me. “If you want someone in your life, why do you need to sign marriage papers? Why can’t it just be a partnership?”
Her comments seemed harmless. I was more concerned that her mention of going to pubs might cause controversy, since Yousafzai is Muslim, so I made sure to note in the article that she doesn’t drink alcohol.
The article was published. Yousafzai shared it and thanked me. But the next day, when I checked Twitter (now X), I saw #shameonMalala trending in Pakistan. Her words had been widely misunderstood as a rejection of nikah, the Islamic marriage tradition, and as implying she supported premarital sex.
She dominated Pakistan’s news for days. Online critics accused her of abandoning her religion due to Western influence. A prominent cleric tagged her father on Twitter, demanding an explanation for her “un-Islamic” remarks. (He responded.)(They claimed their words had been misunderstood.) Even lawmakers in a regional assembly in north-west Pakistan discussed her remarks. Malala Yousafzai remained quiet and composed. Then, in November 2021, she revealed her unexpected marriage to Asser Malik, a Pakistani cricket manager. Many people, including me, found it hard to understand.
[Image description: Malala wearing a Stella McCartney shirt, Kent & Curwen skirt, and Gucci headscarf and shoes]
“Malala, what happened?!” I ask as she enters an empty conference room alone and hugs me.
She gives a shy smile. “When you asked that question about meeting someone,” she says, “I felt caught off guard. I thought, does she know something? I kept telling myself, no, no, I just don’t want to get married.”
In her book Finding My Way, Yousafzai shares that she and Malik were already in a relationship during the Vogue interview. In other words, she overreacted to throw me off track.
But her doubts about marriage were genuine. Growing up in Pakistan, she saw it as “a future with no opportunities, where your husband controls your life.”
[Image description: Yousafzai with her husband Asser Malik last month]
After the uproar, her parents, especially her mother, were very upset. “She was so mad at me,” Yousafzai recalls. Relatives and friends kept sending her articles, and an imam from her village phoned her parents to scold them. “I felt a lot of pressure, mainly from my dad and mum, to release a statement explaining my views on marriage, which I thought was ridiculous.”
Then there was Malik. Her parents had met him, but she wasn’t ready to go public with their relationship. She felt bad for denying him openly, but he didn’t hold it against her and even helped smooth things over with her parents. Over the next few months, Yousafzai started to rethink her stance on marriage. She asked Malik about his views on women and equality and was pleased with his answers. “As someone who advocates for girls and women, I realized I was limiting myself with my own narrow view of marriage,” she says.
She also faced the common pressures felt by many immigrant children clashing with their parents’ cultural expectations. When she and Malik went out together, her mother would remind them to “keep about 10 feet apart.”
Reading Finding My Way, it seems she might not have married so young if not for her parents. She nods. “I felt like I was giving in,” she admits. Refusing to marry would have sparked conflict not just within her family but on a wider scale. “Was I ready to fight my mum and dad? To start a debate about living together without traditional or religious ceremonies?” Yousafzai realized she couldn’t live with Malik without a proper marriage according to their customs.
She could have stood her ground, but it would have deeply hurt her parents. Plus, she was in love. “He’s so charming and smart, I couldn’t stop thinking about him.” So she agreed. On November 9, 2021, at her parents’ home in Birmingham, Yousafzai married in an Islamic ceremony.
After getting married, Yousafzai found that “things feel pretty much the same; not much has changed.” She and Malik live in a riverside apartment in London, sharing chores but neither cooking—they eat out or order in. (Her mother calls this “a disaster” and jokes, “Your fridge is the only one with no vegetables!”)
Though only four years have passed since we last met, Yousafzai has changed noticeably. The woman I met before seemed more youthful and a bit awkward, visibly embarrassed when we talked about relationships.Now she feels grounded and at ease. Her appearance has also changed subtly, following surgery to address the facial paralysis she experienced after the attack.
At university, Malala Yousafzai tasted the sweetness of independent adult life for the first time. When we met in 2021, she described a whirlwind of college balls, student societies, and last-minute essay panics. Now, she’s more open about the unfiltered reality of her university years.
“I thought nothing could scare me, nothing. And then I was scared of small things, and that just broke me,” she reflects.
In her book, Finding My Way, Yousafzai writes about the pressures of international travel, maintaining key relationships for the Malala Fund—which supports girls’ education projects worldwide—and balancing paid speaking engagements. She is the primary earner not only for her parents and two brothers but also for her extended family in Pakistan and even family friends. At one point, she was covering college expenses for two family friends studying in the US and Canada.
When asked if she resented these financial responsibilities, Yousafzai admitted, “It was difficult to manage.” She “hated the experience of thinking about our expenses for the next year and realizing, OK, I have to do this event, because otherwise we won’t be able to cover these costs.”
Her academic performance suffered as a result. Yousafzai received a 2.2 in her first-year exams and had to seek extra help from tutors—a humbling experience for the world’s most famous education activist. “I felt like an impostor,” she laughs. “I felt ashamed.” She even asked her tutor to write a letter to her parents explaining that she was prohibited from working during term time because she was failing her degree. Why didn’t she tell them herself? “I had talked to my family many times about the pressure,” she says, “and how difficult it was to manage.”
She writes about how, at home in Birmingham, “my dad treated our house like an art museum, and me like the signature piece in the collection.” She would often be called downstairs to meet visitors eager to see a Nobel laureate up close. “My dad is a very generous person,” she says, “a giving person, and he always understood what other people wanted… in his heart, he knew that they wanted to meet me.”
When I ask if there have been times when he pushed her too far, she laughs and replies, “Oh, he has physically pushed me.” At family events or when meeting well-wishers, her father Ziauddin would sometimes give her a gentle nudge. “You know when you have a little kid, and you sort of push the kid to say hello to this person? I’m like, it’s fine when they’re little kids, you know.” Despite her occasional grumbling, it’s clear Yousafzai holds deep love and respect for the man who, however unintentionally, propelled her onto the global stage. “My dad has always been supportive,” she says. “Whenever I explain something to him, he completely understands it. He is one of those cool dads who never disagrees with me.”
Yet I suspect even the world’s most down-to-earth father might have concerns about what Yousafzai—whose new book is likely to be a bestseller, as her first memoir sold nearly two million copies—is about to share publicly.
And then there’s the bong incident. That night, Yousafzai tried to walk back to her room but blacked out along the way. A friend carried her back instead. She couldn’t sleep, her mind replaying the day the Taliban tried to kill her on an endless loop: the gun, the spray of blood, her body being carried through crowds to an ambulance.
She had always believed she couldn’t remember being shot. But the bong…The experience unlocked long-buried memories of the attack and of a childhood overshadowed by Taliban violence. “I had never felt so close to the attack as in that moment,” she tells me. “It felt like I was reliving it all, and at one point I even thought I was in the afterlife.” She believed she was dying, or already dead. “It’s easier to laugh about it now,” she says with a faint, strained smile.
Hearing her speak, I feel profound compassion for what she endured as a child. “I was nine or ten when the Taliban took control of our valley,” she recalls. “They bombed schools, killed or slaughtered people, and hung their bodies upside down.”
After the incident, Yousafzai developed anxiety. “I felt numb… I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror,” she admits. The joy of college life faded. She mentioned the event to her parents in vague terms, but “they were a bit dismissive,” she says. She found it hard to convey how deeply it had impacted her mental health. “I just couldn’t make them understand that things weren’t the same anymore.”
Friends grew concerned about her. (Maria, her personal assistant in London, was so worried that she drove to be with her right after the incident.) Yousafzai lied and assured them she was fine. “I’m the girl who was shot… I’m supposed to be brave,” she explains. But eventually, she could no longer keep up the pretense. “I’d be sweating, shaking, and I could hear my heart pounding. Then I started having panic attacks.” She sought therapy and realized that her childhood trauma, the attempted murder, and exam stress were overwhelming her mental health. In her book, Yousafzai lists her symptoms at the time: a racing heart, difficulty breathing, trouble sleeping, brain fog, and a constant fear of losing a loved one. “Normal people don’t have lists like this,” she writes, adding, “Something is wrong with me.”
“I survived an attack,” she reflects, “and nothing happened to me, and I laughed it off. I thought nothing could scare me, nothing. My heart was so strong. And then I was scared of small things, and that just broke me. But through this journey, I learned what it truly means to be brave—when you can fight not only external threats but also the battles within.”
Has becoming famous at such a young age also affected her? “Yes,” Yousafzai replies with a firm nod. She describes how young she was when she began winning awards and what it was like to attend ceremonies alongside activists who had dedicated decades to their causes. It made her feel she had to “spend the rest of my life campaigning for girls’ education” to prove herself worthy.
No matter how many leaders she lobbied or projects she supported—Yousafzai lights up when she talks about the girls’ school she opened back home—she always felt it wasn’t enough. There was “always this feeling… could I do more?” Her youthful idealism began to wane.When I was 12 years old…
“The criticism isn’t directed at me personally,” she explains. “It’s more about challenging Western perspectives and larger political narratives, though I’m connected to those discussions.” Still, the weight of it is evident. “It does make me sad,” she admits, “that I often have to reread everything multiple times before sharing it online. I’m constantly wondering what might trigger negative reactions. It’s challenging. I wish I had more freedom to express myself openly.”
After concluding the political portion of our conversation, Yousafzai breathes a sigh of relief and stretches her arms, as if we’ve completed a demanding task and can now unwind. In contrast, she becomes animated when discussing her family and her husband, Malik, laughing frequently. Her enthusiasm peaks when talking about Recess, an investment fund focused on women’s sports that she recently started with Malik.
Contrary to my initial assumption, Recess isn’t a nonprofit—it’s a business aimed at boosting involvement in women’s athletics. Malik introduced Yousafzai to the joys of physical activity. As someone passionate about cricket, she was initially drawn to him because of his background in cricket management, though he jokingly clarifies that he wasn’t a professional player. “He insists, ‘I worked in cricket management, I wasn’t a cricketer!'” she says with an eye roll. “He didn’t mention that before we got married.” Through Recess, she hopes to expand opportunities for women in sports and ensure their representation at all levels, from the field to leadership roles.
Before we part, I ask if her parents have read her book, Finding My Way. She tells me she’s summarized it for them, but they haven’t read it yet. “I’ve said, ‘You can read it after it’s published, pick it up from any bookstore, and feel free to read it—but no revisions allowed.'” I recognize this approach, common among children of immigrants like myself: seek forgiveness rather than permission. Yet I’m also surprised, knowing that as a global icon, her personal revelations will likely spark controversy back home.
She’s prepared for that. “I’m ready for it,” Yousafzai states calmly. “I won’t get defensive or issue any statements. If people have questions, they can read the book and form their own opinions.”
As I leave, it occurs to me that she never chose this path—being shot as a child, evacuated to the UK, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Yousafzai has always prioritized others, whether honoring her parents’ cultural expectations around marriage, supporting her family, or advocating for girls’ education. “I’m learning to say no and be more direct,” she shares. “I tend to overthink how others might feel.”
If her teens and early twenties were about serving others, her late twenties are about choosing her own happiness. She’s earned it. Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on October 21st for £25. To order a copy for £22.50, visit guardian.bookshop.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about Malala Yousafzais statement To the worlds leaders I was merely a photo opportunity reflecting on her journey
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 Who is Malala Yousafzai
Malala is a Pakistani activist for female education who was shot by the Taliban as a teenager for going to school She survived and became the youngestever Nobel Peace Prize laureate
2 What does she mean by being a photo opportunity for world leaders
She means that some leaders took pictures with her to make themselves look good and caring but they didnt follow through with meaningful action or policy changes to support the causes she fights for like education for all children
3 Did Malala Yousafzai really have a problem with drugs
No this is a misunderstanding The phrase using drugs almost shattered is likely a misquote or confusion with another story Malalas story is about being attacked for her activism not about substance abuse
4 What is she disillusioned about
She is disillusioned with world leaders and powerful institutions She expected them to take her advocacy seriously and create real change but she feels they often used her story for publicity without making the hard commitments needed
5 What is the main cause Malala fights for
Her primary cause is ensuring every girl around the world has access to 12 years of free safe and quality education
AdvancedLevel Questions
6 How did her neardeath experience shape her perspective on leadership
Surviving the assassination attempt gave her a powerful platform but it also showed her how quickly public sympathy can fade without concrete action It taught her that true leadership requires more than just words or photo ops it requires accountability and sustained effort
7 Can you give an example of a world leader using her as a photo opportunity
While she hasnt named specific individuals you can find numerous photos of her with presidents prime ministers and CEOs at highprofile events like at the UN or the White House Her statement suggests that for some of these leaders the meeting was more about the positive PR than a serious strategy session
8 What is the difference between symbolic support and tangible action in activism
