Julia's Book Club - Fundamentally
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It did show me a world that I would never have gone into and for that I was very, very grateful and it made me laugh a lot along the way. But the humour is very, very dark. It's so dark sometimes you need night vision goggles and it's filthy. I mean, it's really filthy, a lot of the humour. For me to say that... You heard it here first. That's a new benchmark. Woo! Woo!

Hello and welcome to this month's Book Club episode and a big hello to my co-host, Cathy Lett. Cathy, how are you? Oh, it's so great to see you again. Chatting books, our favourite topic besides books, in my case. And book royalties, yeah. And book royalties.

royalties favourite topic we are going to chat books but what have you been up to during this London summer where you're wearing a jumper I wore a coat this morning got my thermal bra on I went to the Hay Literary Festival and

which I hadn't been for a few years. It was fantastic. You were very missed this year. Yes, I was intending to go but unfortunately couldn't get there. A little accident prevented me but I'm all good now. Yeah, but it was really good. For me it was great because to connect with your readers and

And to actually, because it's such a lonely life being a writer. You're sitting in your office hoping what you say is going to resonate. And then when you actually hear readers laughing at what you've got to say, and then they, I mean, I signed for an hour and a half. It was so fabulous and just the most incredible, witty, earthy, warm and wise women. It was just such a shot in the arm. You know, it's very good, good, um.

Good for writers to get that feeling now and then. The Hay Festival is beautiful. For those who don't know it, it is in a small Welsh village, Hay-on-Wye, and it's grown to be a huge summer festival. Thousands of people go. But they also have a winter festival in the area.

November, December, and that's much, much smaller in things like the Village Church. Oh, lovely. So both of them have got quite a different feel, but they're really good fun. Yeah, and the Hay Festival attracts really big names. I mean, Salman Rushdie was there this year, Stephen Fry, I mean, often Obama, Clinton. I mean, if you've got a book out, that's the festival you want to be in. So it's a really stimulating – it's like one mental macchiato after another. Yeah.

Well, we've got a book to discuss, which possibly wasn't on the agenda at Hay, but it's definitely on our agenda today. And it is a very funny, very sharp debut novel by British author Nisaba Younis. And it follows the story of Nadia, an

academic disowned by her mother and dumped by her long-term partner, who accepts a job with the United Nations in Iraq to rehabilitate ISIS women so that they will be able to go back to their home countries.

And Nadia doing this work, she clashes with colleagues, she feels out of her depth, she's trying to get the program off the ground. She's about to give up when she meets Sarah, a fellow Londoner who became radicalized when she was just 15 years old and went off to be an ISIS bride. And in Sarah, Nadia sees someone just like herself. She's thinking to herself that in a different life, that could have been her.

But the relationship between the two women is more complex than heroic saviour and someone who wants to be saved.

But in giving all of that description, what I feel like I've missed out is this is an incredibly funny book, darkly funny. But you would think you shouldn't be putting the word funny and the word ISIS in the same sentence. These are two words that should never meet. But here they do. This is a very Kathy Lett book.

You picked it. I chose it, yeah. You chose it. You love your humorous books. You write very humorous books. What did you make of it, that capacity for humor in this dark world? I fundamentally love this book. It's caustic. It's comic. Razor sharp. You could shave your legs on the one-liners. It's so sharp.

And it's sort of Bridget Jones with ISIS brides. I hate the term ISIS brides. It's a way tabloids describe young women who were groomed, tricked and trafficked to Syria. But that's the sort of tabloid term for it. And you would think that you could not find comedy in this. But see, as you mentioned, I love using humour here.

as a way of getting a message across because if you can disarm with charm you've got a much more likely it's much more likely that you get your more serious intent

you know, over to the reader. But people sometimes say to me, oh, is there any subject you wouldn't cover with your comedy? And I think that's like going to a doctor and saying, yeah, cure my tennis elbow and my, you know, my nasal warts, but don't touch my throat cancer or whatever. Everything is ripe for satirical examination and a comic cure.

And this book absolutely proves that. I mean, it taught me so much about a world I did not know about, which is the refugee camps where these poor women and their children are kind of herded. And it's so inhumane. It's so cruel. And they deserve to be rehabilitated, which Australia has done, by the way, and a lot of other countries in the world. So it taught me a lot about that world. But it did it with this

searingly, scorchingly comic prose that I absolutely loved. And, you know, I always say to critics that they miss the point that literature can be profound but also pleasurable. And way back, you know, Dr Johnson had this great quote where he said, the true end of literature is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or endure it.

You know, and if you read something funny, it's like strapping a giant shock absorber to your brain. You know, it allows you to deal with the darker side of life, which this book, I think, does absolutely brilliantly, don't you? Yeah, I really enjoyed the book. I mean, the title fundamentally, I think, is doing work at multiple levels. Nadia, our principal protagonist, was a devout Muslim girl and then she turned away from it, much to the disappointment of her mother.

And Sarah, of course, is a girl who's become radicalised because she's gone to effectively join ISIS. So it's doing that work about religion, but it's also doing work around what are fundamentally your values and who you are. And for these women, that is what the book is working its way through, particularly for Nadia.

But your analysis of humour is not a universally shared one. There are lots of people who would say there are things beyond the remit of humour. And as I was reading this book, and I'd have to say I did really enjoy it, but there were times when it was sort of like a little wince.

because it's very critical of the United Nations. I mean, Nadia is there. She's supposed to be creating this program. Actually, she's an academic on the run from London because she's broken up with her lover and she's like, I'm just going to get out of here. She's got no practical experience in running a program in a former war zone where there are still people who are victims of that war.

And so, you know, she's incredibly naive. And then she runs into this UN system, which is all about scrapping agencies and who's got the resources and how can you get one up on the person in the other agency. A lot of corruption, a lot of over-bureaucracy, all of that.

Yeah, and, you know, particularly in today's world where Donald Trump has smashed so much of the aid and development system, and I certainly have many friends who work in that system and they are professional, motivated people doing lots of good in the world. There were moments when I was like, ooh, wince, ooh, wince. I know. Even though you could feel the humour in it.

The author, we'll use her surname, Eunice, she has actually worked in this system. She is not someone who's just writing a novel about it. She's actually been in the aid and development system. And that's why I like the book because it's grounded in authenticity of her experience, you know. Though is it? Because it's authentic in the sense that she knows that world, but it's also...

You know, it would be... You would be able to write a wickedly funny scene about authors at a book festival. And yes, it would be grounded in your experience of going to Hay and many other book festivals, but you'd be pulling some threads and, you know, adding to them. It's not a documentary. It's not a documentary. It's a comedy drama. Yeah, that's right. And so I do think...

we should acknowledge there could be people who pick this up and

are a bit offended by bits of it. It's not going to be universally, yeah, I love it. You know, you've got to roll with the humour. I certainly rolled with the humour. I thought it was, you know, had a lot of propulsion in the plot. You really wanted to know what was happening next. But there are people it would be a little bit much for. I think that's true. And also, my point, though, is I would not have picked up a book, a turgid academic study about the refugee camps. You know, I wouldn't.

It was a gateway into a world I should know about because it brought to very visceral life what those camps are like, the dust, the desperation, the sadness, the waste of human potential. And I think that was an important thing for us to know. And also because the tabloids do always demonise these young women as ISIS brides. They were young women who were groomed, tricked and trafficked.

And they were in their teens often. And they deserve to be rehabilitated, you know. And so I think that the arguments that she put forward I found very persuasive and I also found it very moving, reading between the comic lines when you can really smell the desperation of this situation. And it's important that these young women are rehabilitated. I mean, even the former head of MI5 said,

said that it's not only the humane thing to do, there is security risk while they're out there because they can also be taken captive by enemies and then used as hostages. Like, you know, just get them home. So it did show me a world that I would never have gone into and for that I was very, very grateful and it made me laugh a lot along the way. But the humour is very, very dark. It's so dark sometimes you need night vision goggles and it's filthy. I mean, it's really filthy, a lot of the humour. For me to say that...

You heard it here first. That's a new benchmark. But she has what I love. I like people who've got that black belt in tongue-fu. She can fire off a one-liner. She actually did a stand-up comedy course to learn how to deliver comedy, which is paid off in the book.

And I just find that very, very appealing because it suits my own sense of humour. And also, it is a very autobiographical novel. And people's first novels, the first rule of a novel writing is to make your first book pretty autobiographical because you're drawing on your own experiences, which is an easier way to learn to write books.

So, you know, I did that with puberty blues in my late teens and that was throwing, it's very similar, throwing a kind of hand grenade into the sexist brutality of the surfy culture.

And I also got into a lot of trouble from people saying, how can you make fun of this and be light about this and this misogyny? And how dare you actually write about these women's experiences in this graphic way? So I suppose I had a connection with her as an author in that way because I thought I did something, a different world, but the same sort of detonation. Yes, yes.

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The character at the centre, Nadia, is one who's on the run in a lot of ways. I mean, she's on the run from her relationship with her mother. And we seem, as we talk about women's fiction, lots of times to have books that are raising relationships with mothers. And there is this quite beautiful paragraph about

how their relationship fell apart when Nadia told her mother that she had renounced her Muslim faith. And the paragraph is,

Faith had once nourished and sustained me, but over time it had curdled, my insides recoiling as I continued to ram it into myself. And then she concludes, a new life was possible now. What did you make of the relationship with the mother? Because it actually comes back in various waves throughout the book. Well, first of all, the character of Nadia, she's not that likeable.

She's brash. She's egotistical. She's reckless and ruthless. You know, she does a lot of sort of despicable things. But the reason you stay with her is this sad backstory because she does – it's a contrapuntal novel in that way. We're in the present, in the camps, having her narrative drama, the drive of trying to save Sarah. But we're also getting these backstories about her very fraught relationship with her mother who's disowned her.

And then her breakup with her girlfriend because her self-esteem is so low after her mother cuts her off. Her self-esteem is like lower than Kim Kardashian's bikini line, which is so pretty low. Yeah.

Which is why she allows herself to be treated so badly in her lesbian relationship, I think. So you feel for her because you can see she's arrived in Baghdad with her suitcases but also so much emotional baggage. And I think the reason that she becomes clear in the novel when she tries to save Sarah, she tries to give her the unconditional love

of a mother that she has been starved. She hasn't got that from her own mother. So I felt that she was trying to mother this girl in a way that she wasn't being mothered. So it's psychologically quite interesting when you unpack it. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it is psychologically interesting. And I liked the fact that

in the waves of the relationship that come and go with her mother, that her mother's first instinct is to rebuild their relationship by just not mentioning the war. All these years go by and you don't speak to each other and then you kind of get back in contact and say, you know, someone in the family's got a family occasion on and you should come

come and by the way, I'm making the favourite food that you like, you know, and we're not going to talk about any of that. And the struggles within Nadia is to do you talk about it? How do you talk about it when you know that if you bring the conflict back

back into your discussions, then you will just go down the same lines of conflict? Or do you seek to rebuild the relationship knowing that actually you're just throwing this vast veil of silence over all of this hurt? And rebuilding it on quicksand, really, because it's still there, the pain, the anguish, the rejection. Yeah.

So, yes. Yeah, all of it. And I thought that was very realistic. Me too. Families are so like that. You know, in every family there's the flashpoints where, oh, we'll just, you know, park that behind and continue to have the meals and the jokes and the rituals that are there for our family life.

Um, she also does go on this, you know, sort of personal voyage of discovery about who she is and what she's capable of as she runs out this program for ISIS. And I know you don't like the terminology brides, but, uh, it's used in the book ISIS brides, uh,

And she does develop this very strong connection with Sarah, Sarah. I'm saying Sarah, you're saying Sarah. I think that's because you've been in the UK longer than me. You're talking more properly. Rounding my vowel. Rounding. I've had a vowel transplant. And I've even gone quite badly saying more properly. That's not...

There's nowhere near good English. Especially on a literacy program. Oh, my. Oh, my, no. You'll be on detention. Yeah, absolutely, and deserve it. The relationship between the two of them is a very...

I mean, Nadia wants to save her because she's got in her mind's eye, if I'd stayed a devout Muslim girl, maybe, maybe, maybe this could have been me. And she actually reflects back to a relationship with...

earlier in her life with a person that she looked up to, that she was introduced to. A preacher, a radical preacher. A radical preacher through a sort of camp, you know, equivalent of a community camp. Which actually the author did go through that experience. Yes, she did. She was almost radicalised herself. Yes. So that was also rang very true, all those scenes, I thought, and explains why she has this resonance with Sarah, Sarah. Yeah.

Because it's sliding doors. She thinks that could have been me. And I really liked that aspect of the novel because, you know, think about how vulnerable you are as a teenager, how impressionable. Yes. How you just want to belong, that desperation to belong. You know, and there was sold this fantasy about these beautiful young men who'd adore them and it'd be like Nirvana. And, you know, you can't imagine how seductive that would be to certain people. Oh, absolutely. And I think the...

Male figure who apparently has all of the answers. When you as a troubled teenager do not. That's a very seductive figure. So she gets in her mind's eye, this young woman, it could have been me. And she therefore projects a whole personality and set of beliefs onto Sarah and her

She doesn't want to live up to it. That's not her. That's not who she is. And at one point in telling this story, the author writes this lovely paragraph.

burning itself, recoiling in pain, then returning over and over again. Beautiful paragraph. So there are moments in the book that are poignant and it's not just, you know, it's not just a comedic Kalashnikov firing off one-liners. There is poignancy and depth of character and there is emotional depth

sort of nourishment in the book as well. So I just wanted to make that clear, even though it is very, very funny. And I insist on telling you my favourite bits at some point that made me really laugh. Okay, tell me the bits that made you laugh. And we should say there are also some, you know, sex scenes a la Kathy Lett writing. There totally are. The sex scenes were hilarious. Well, she sort of...

She sort of lowers the tone and sets the bar to this low comic level when she first arrives. And we see the security guards going through her suitcase at the UN compound. And he finds a lilac bullet vibrator and a copy of Cosmopolitan. And the headline screams, everything you need to know about rimming. Yeah.

And then she falls straight into bed, or she falls into the arms and into the bed of this big bit of beefcake. And he's not the brightest bloke you'd ever meet. Not the brightest. Yeah, but very, very handsome and delicious in other ways. Even in the frightening bits, she finds the funny, like when she's out in this terrible sandstorm. Now he's wondering, does this count as microdermabrasion? LAUGHTER

And then she's talking about when she meets Sarah, who's this very bolshie, cynical, sort of sweary teenager from East London. And she joined ISIS when she was 15. And I think she'd had three husbands in succession before she got into the camp.

And she's complaining about her roommate who snores like a mad ting. Every night it sounds like the fucking invasion of Mosul. And then she jokes that the best way to improve Stratford Westfield Shopping Centre would be to drop a bomb on it. And they're trying to rehabilitate her and she's talking in this language, right? So she does send up the local organisations to the UN, as you said earlier, which some of our friends would find a little bit...

Nardu has to explain to a stubborn civil servant that the women she's advocating for are all cisgendered, straight and Muslim. Otherwise, they'd already have been beheaded. It is dark, dark humour. Yes, yes. How's your inclusion policy going? Oh, hang on. I know, I know. And I just found it so daring and bold and such a fresh, original voice. Yes.

that that's what I found very beguiling. And so many books written now, I'm finding them a little bit too sort of navel-gazing and a bit coy and a bit twee and like stop looking inward, look outward, look at the world. And she is looking at the big, broad canvas and making us look at it too. And I just found that so fresh. I agree with that and I think many books...

don't have enough of a plot line. It's been a feature, I think, of literature over the last few years that you have some absolutely beautifully written books, but it's not a plot. You are at no point asking yourself the question, oh, I wonder what happens next? Or, you know, could I stay up another half hour and read the next chapter because I really want to know what happens here or what happens there?

This has got that. It's not just reflective, talking about yourself, talking to each other. It does have a plot line. You're not just getting psychological fluff out of your navel. No. No.

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If I was going to be the literary critic, let me do that. I think there are times when tone-wise, despite the fact, I agree with you, that this is looking out on the world and to a particular part of the world that people will learn about through this book and wouldn't have learned about otherwise. They wouldn't pick up a non-fiction book about it.

And, you know, it's bold and it's brassy. But there are a few times where it does degenerate a little bit into self-help.

And I particularly picked up this paragraph. It jarred me when I read it. It is Nadia reflecting on her relationship with her partner, Rosie, and she has effectively taken herself off to this UN gig because she's on the run from this failed relationship with Rosie. And she says the following in the book.

I grieved for my younger self, for the girl who believed that love meant banishing your instincts and pleasing someone else, no matter the cost to yourself. By my mum enforcing such rigid expectations and discarding me when I failed to measure up, she taught me that love was scarce and conditional, that speaking up and inhabiting your authenticity only leads to rejection and pain.

It left me vulnerable, alone and desperate with a profound belief in my unworthiness and a servile willingness to yield to the object of my love. And I was like, I know, I agree. Because we know that. We're reading between her lines. She didn't have to spell that out for us.

No, that's right. I totally agree with that. She should have trusted the intelligence of the reader that we could jigsaw this story together. So I also did not like those particular paragraphs. Yes. But maybe that's a generational thing. You know, maybe it's because that younger generation...

They are all into that kind of the self-help manuals and whatever. I don't know. Maybe we're just out of step with them. Maybe we are. Though, if I had to pick a pet hate phrase, it would be your authenticity, I think. And sitting in your truth. And we're all on a journey. Sitting in your truth. I'm like, I'd rather sit in pigeon poop than sit in my truth. How boring. Yeah.

But that, honestly, I do not want to discourage anyone from reading it. That's a nitpick, not a huge critique of the book. You will find yourself laughing out loud and you will find yourself learning things. It is also peopled by other characters. We've talked about the main characters, but there are some beautiful little character studies. There are.

within the UN personnel, the relationships between them, who's having an affair, who's running from what sort of crisis in their ordinary life, and who's chasing the adrenaline of constantly being in at-risk situations. She does all of that beautifully, I think. Adrenaline junkies, yes, very beautifully.

And she also paints the picture of other women who are in this refugee camp who have been radicalised, who have ended up with ISIS, who now want desperately to go home, but their home governments are anxious about having them back and how radicalised are they?

And there are some beautiful little character studies in that too, I think. So it is, you know, a novel that definitely has the strong protagonist at the centre of it. I mean, it is Nadia's story. She's a bit of an anti-heroine though because, as I said, she is hard to love sometimes. She is hard to love and I agree. She is a bit of an anti-heroine and she is put in –

you know, ridiculous situations. Ridiculous because she finds the humour in them. I mean, they're not ridiculous in the sense of it can't have happened to someone, but she finds the humour, like that beautiful microderm abrasion line, you know, you're out...

out trying to make your way through the desert. Will you live? Will you die of thirst? And this is the thought in her mind. But at least I'll look good. At least my skin will look good. Yeah. That's what I meant about it being like Bridget Jones with Isis Brides. It's got that Bridget Jones kind of chaotic, comic, nutty, kooky side to it, which is disarming.

I mean, I found the book to be sort of more disarming than the UN peacekeeping force. But I did also like the serious side and I really liked the twist because the twist, I mean, I don't think we're giving anything away by saying that Sarah, as you mentioned earlier, is not the woman we think she is. And she's actually would dismiss Nadia as a kind of slag because she's sexually liberated. Yeah.

So, and I won't spoil the ending, but there is a surprising twist towards the ending, but also a fabulous reconciliation ending, which I like. I like a novel that ends with a major chord, you know, a nice, satisfying major chord of where, because the book is about religion and religion should be about love, but it's nearly always about hate. Mm-hmm.

So the fact that there is love at the end and family love, that there is actually hope and we don't sort of end the book wanting to go and throw ourselves off a bridge or anything. There is optimism, hope and resilience and also it's kind of an ode to the good side of human nature in the end.

Yes, I agree. And for someone who spends a bit of her time at universities and actually a novel we did earlier in this season of the podcast, Raise the Academic World, I did get a very big laugh out of the snitchy,

backbiting, nasty academic world that Nadia comes from. Because what launches her into this UN world is that she's desperately wanted to get a tenured job at the university, but she has to produce something novel and interesting. And she lands on producing this academic work about young women and

and it's this academic paper that then gets her the job at the UN. And she has no experience. Yeah, but she didn't do the paper because, you know, this is the cause of my lifetime or anything like this. She did the paper because she was desperately competing with another woman for this scarce job in academia. And if she didn't get one up on this other woman, she wasn't going to get it. So there's this very beautiful, snitchy,

You know, you can really immerse yourself in it, backstory. And also, just to put this book in context, I mean, two of my favourite comic books are set in war zones. But this is the first one that's been written in a long time, Scoop, Evelyn Waugh. Yes. A brilliant satire about a character who's mistakenly sent to a war zone and

because they think it's his more famous cousin, and he's a nobody, and he does get a journalistic scoop when he comes back expecting all these accolades. You know, the accolades are going to the cousin who didn't ever go. And then there's also Catch-22. Yes. Which is set, you know, that's a savage satire on the futility of war, but hysterically funny. It is. So I think this book could join that literary canon, you know, of Venom.

Very brave, bold satires on just the futility and ridiculousness of going around trying to kill each other. Yes, I agree with that. And it's good to remind us that there is not only a literary tradition, but a movie tradition, you know, Oh, What a Lovely War and all of those that have you laughing, but perhaps

behind it is a very clear message about the waste, the pain. Now, who would you recommend this book to? Oh, everybody, because we're living in very dark times and we need as much light as we can possibly get.

And just to be able to laugh at such a serious subject matter is a relief. You know, and scientists say that laughing, laughter comes from the oldest part of the brain, the hypothalamus, however you pronounce it. You know, anthropologists tell us that laughing is good for us. Biologists say it's very good to boost our health.

and that women in all cultures on the planet laugh more often than men, probably laughing at men. So in that way, it's kind of literary penicillin. It will give you a good hearty laugh at a very serious subject, shining light into a dark corner.

I agree. I would recommend this to everyone too. So whether you're in winter and you need a good book to curl up with, or you're in the English summer where you may still be by a fireplace with a blanket over you and you need a good book to curl up with, this is a book for you. And I will be intrigued to see what she as an author does next.

Because you're right, this is grounded in things that she's experienced, obviously taken to a comedic level and a caricatured level, but grounded in things that she's experienced. And to make that next leap to the next book, I mean, you did it, but it's got to be quite hard to find the next path. Well, this might be her, she might be one book wonder. That does happen. Sometimes people write their debut novel. Catch-22 was a debut novel.

And he didn't write another book for a long time. So we shall see. But we'll meet her next week at the Women's Prize for Fiction because she's on the shortlist. Yes, yes. So as we're recording this, we are a week away from knowing who is going to win the Women's Prize for Literature. And this book fundamentally is definitely on the shortlist. We don't

have any inside knowledge. So no spoiler alerts here. We just don't know. But definitely on the shortlist. And the best thing is we haven't reviewed any of the people on the shortlist. We haven't reviewed any of their books badly. So we don't have to hide.

We don't have to hide. How did you find the topic for your second novel, given how autobiographical your first one was? Well, I didn't write one. I wrote plays for a while because the second book syndrome is a really big issue. When you've had a big success, particularly, it's like, how can I ever top that?

And so I wrote plays for a while and then I turned one of the plays into a book called Girls' Night Out, which went to number one in Australia. So that was few. But it did take me a while to get the courage, you know. But the great thing about being a writer, a comic writer, is that I think poetic justice is the only true justice in the world. You can always impale an enemy on the end of your pen. So as long as she's got someone she wants to shish kebab,

on her biro, I'm sure her career will be strong. Well, I'm not sure that we should be wishing for Eunice that her life is full of enemies, but we will be intrigued to see what she does next. Cathy, as always, thank you so much for reading a book with me and for talking about it. And this is very much the Cathy Lett episode, a Cathy-picked book.

Kathy's kind of humour and you've had Kathy's analysis. Thank you very much. You pick the next one, your turn. Oh, right. I will try not to pick something that you then go, oh, no. Not to deter, no. We will pick something nice and upbeat. Thanks, Kathy. It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you.

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