How We Met
A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures
By Huma Qureshi
Hardback / non-fiction / Elliott & Thompson / 28 January 2021 / £14.99
You can’t choose who you fall in love with, they say.
If only it were that simple.
Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddles two worlds – school and teenage crushes in one; the expectations and unwritten rules of her family’s south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two is sometimes a tightrope act, but she manages it. Until it came to marriage.
Caught between familial duty and her own appetite for adventure, Huma seeks refuge in Paris and imagines a future full of possibility. And then her father has a stroke and everything changes.
As she learns to focus on herself she realises that searching for a suitor has been masking everything that was wrong in her life. Marriage – arranged or otherwise – can’t be the all-consuming purpose of her life. And then she meets someone. Neither Pakistani nor Muslim nor brown, and therefore technically not suitable at all. When your worlds collide, how do you measure one love against another?
As much as it is about love, How We Met is also about how we fall out with and misunderstand each other, and how sometimes even our closest relationships can feel so far away. Warm, wise, tender and hopeful, this is a coming-of-age story about what it really means to find 'happy ever after'.
Talking Points
Defying your parents’ expectation of marriage
Bringing your children up with multiple identities
Raising three boys
Grieving a parent (Huma's father died when she was in her early 20s, profoundly shaping her experience of early adulthood)
The relationship between mother and daughter, and how we come to better understand our parents with age
Learning to be happy and fulfilled in your own company
Being a mother and a writer and carving out time to work
Marriage ten years on, and how it evolves and changes after having children
Huma's own love story – meeting her husband, who converted to Islam soon after
Home – where it is and how that changes. As Huma’s mother is selling the family home, she is in the process of buying her ‘forever’ family home
Growing up with love stories – how growing up reading Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer shaped Huma’s romantic ideals, and how nineteenths century social etiquette and the matchmaking mothers seemed so reminiscent of the circles in which she grew up
Navigating others’ perceptions as a person of colour in the media.
About Huma Qureshi
Huma Qureshi is an award-winning writer and journalist, and contributor to The Best Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood (2020). A former Guardian reporter, she has also written for The Times, Independent, Observer, Grazia, New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She is a regular contributor to BBC2’s Pause for Thought and has appeared as a contributor on BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC London, BBC Breakfast and the BBC Asian Network. She is the winner of the 2020 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize.
