Tanya Mosley

I'm Tanya Mosley.

College is often a time to figure out who we are, to fall in love for the first time, to experiment, to fail, to question what we believe.

But for my guest today, Malala Yousafzai, it was different.

She spent her college years under scrutiny and 24-hour security.

When she was 15, Malala survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, a gunshot to the head while riding home on a school bus.

But long before that, she'd been standing up to them, demanding the right for girls to go to school in her hometown of Mingora and Pakistan's Swat Valley.

The Taliban had taken control, closing schools, banning women from public life, and brutally punishing anyone who resisted.

After the shooting, Malala's life changed overnight.

She became a symbol of resistance, praised, politicized, and picked apart.

While the world saw an unshakable young woman with a message, Malala was also a teenager, undergoing surgeries to reconstruct what was destroyed by the Taliban, experiencing post-traumatic stress, and navigating others' expectations of who she should be.

Her new memoir, Finding My Way, reveals the person beyond the symbol.

It's the story of a young Malala learning the bounds of what it means to be a free woman, trying on jeans for the first time, falling in love, failing exams, and confronting the trauma of a shooting that for a long time she had no memory of.

Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her efforts to combat the suppression of children and advocate for their education.

She's written several books, including I Am Malala and We Are Displaced, True Stories of Refugee Lives.

The 2015 documentary He Named Me Malala chronicles her family's activism.

Malala Yousafzai, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you.

This memoir, in a way, in many ways, picks up where your first memoir left off.

Just to put ourselves in this place, I mean, such a dichotomy here, and how remarkable this is, because here you are entering college.

I mean, you won the Nobel Prize at 17.