Tonya Mosley

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.

So it's an unbelievable honor that I know you take great pride in, but it also comes, as you say, with this tremendous responsibility to always live up to all that you had endured and

what you've accomplished, what it represents, did that expectation also feel like a cage in the way?

Like you wanted to come into college almost as an anonymous person.

Was there a particular moment when you realized you're at college, when you realized, wait a minute, I could do whatever I want, you know?

And I just want to note for folks that you had 24-hour security because during this time period and the years after you were shot, you received lots of threats against your life.

That's why you had 24-hour security.