In Conversation

This week we spoke to Zain Asher about her spellbinding memoir, Where The Children Take Us. Throughout the book, she pays tribute to her mother’s determination to raise four successful children after a phone call changes their lives forever. For more context, you might want to read this excerpt from the opening chapter before reading the interview.

Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.

NA: The first time I heard your story was in 2014. I was sitting in the audience as you delivered your TEDxEuston talk which has now been watched by over two million people. What inspired you to turn your story into a book?

ZA: With my TEDxEuston talk, it was clear that people were particularly inspired by how my mother raised us, and so I thought that her story and her journey could really help a lot of people. I wrote the book when I turned 36, and that's the same age my mother was when she got the phone call that my dad had passed away. And so, around that time, I just really began to think about everything my mother had achieved. What she'd been through was extraordinary, and I don't know whether I would have the same fortitude or strength if the same thing happened to me, so I just began to really think about how I was going to tell her story.

When I initially spoke to her about it, she couldn’t understand why I’d want to write a book about her experience, she didn’t think she’d achieved anything interesting. But every time I shared memories with friends and co-workers, and told them about some of the things my mother did, their response was always “Oh my gosh, I've got to do that for my kids.” So I just thought that, with the intention to serve and help others, there was so much value in sharing our story. I knew it could speak to a lot of people, especially in terms of showing that, as a mother, you can go through something devastating, and yet still emerge victorious on the other side.

NA: There are many ways to describe this book. The subtitle says it’s about “How One Family Achieved the Unimaginable” which I think is fitting, but was there anything else you were trying to achieve with this book?

ZA: The book is about our family and how my mother raised us, but so much of the book is also about Nigerian culture. I think Nigerian culture is a culture that’s so overlooked, and so many people still have a very skewed view of what Nigeria represents, so I really wanted to tell a different story; a story about our values, our culture and our community spirit. In the book I mentioned that when I got accepted into Oxford, people in my village threw a party. I couldn’t believe that people I didn’t know, people I’d never even shaken hands with, could be so happy to see me do well. That really stayed with me for a long time. And so, whilst the book is mostly about our life story, it also tells the story of every Nigerian immigrant. It’s really all of our stories, but just using my story as a focal point.

NA: When you read a memoir, you expect the author to be the main character, but like you’ve said many times, this is your family’s story, and it’s specifically your mother's story. You did such a good job of detailing parts of her story that you didn’t directly witness — so you weren't with her on the plane back to Nigeria when she received the phone call, but you captured that moment so well. How did you approach that, in terms of drawing on the kind of creativity that’s usually reserved for fiction? How did you manage to paint such a full picture in moments where your view was obscured?

ZA: This is such a great question. So I did a lot of deep dive interviews with my mum, and pretty much every member of my family and extended family. There was so much that my mother had sort of buried and stuffed inside, and she hadn't revisited some of those emotions in over 30 years. And so it was a difficult process for her because it came with a lot of pain. When it came to the real details and writing about how she was feeling on the plane when she was travelling back, I mean, that’s just empathy. Obviously I understand my mother and I know the facts, but being able to paint a detailed emotional picture comes from empathy. You think about how you would be feeling if you were in that position, if you were told that your husband and your son had been involved in a car accident, you just know that it would be a stomach churning moment.

I know that my mother oscillated between hoping for the best and fearing the worst. She talked about going to the pharmacy that my parents ran in Brixton, and just ransacking the shelves and putting all these different items into a bag, hoping that somehow these items could maybe save one of them. But then also, at the same time, hoping that maybe there was some sort of mixed up and that they were both okay. It was just a whirlwind of different emotions and I was able to process how she was feeling through the interviews, but it was more of empathy - especially given that she’s my mother.

NA: Growing up, we think we know our parents pretty well, but did you learn anything new about your mother in the process of writing this book?

ZA: One of the things that I learned is that there's a tendency in our culture to bury emotional wounds, and to just keep going. I wish that my mother had slowed down and really allowed herself to come to terms with what had happened. She had a month or two where she was devastated, but when my brother got kicked out of school, she just rolled up her sleeves and decided to fight for her children. There was no time to journal or talk to somebody to figure out where she was in terms of her emotional health.

There were times, when talking to my mother, I really felt that like the trauma was so deep, so visceral, so painful, that the only way for her to continue was some kind of disassociation. We had to set time limits on our conversations and she would often talk about her experience like it had happened to someone else. Disassociation was the only way she was able to move forward.

When you speak to some Nigerian parents about mental health and emotional health it almost seems overindulgent, but when we go through pain as a people, it's important to really sit and deal with it. During our interviews, I could see that my mother was still in a lot of pain.

NA: It reminds me of something Chinua Achebe wrote about in There Was a Country – there’s no Igbo word for PTSD. It’s even harder to deal with things when you don’t have the language for them. You covered the angle of grief and trauma incredibly well, but what I also loved was how deliberate you were about sharing your parent’s love story. Why was that important for you?

ZA: It was important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my parent’s lives were intertwined since my mother was 14. How she fell in love with my dad and the story of how they moved to London gives you a sense of what my mum lost when she got that phone call. My dad was everything to her, everything. Obviously anyone who loses a husband is going to be devastated, that's expected, but for my parents, their love and their connection was so deep. I think the fact that she was able to keep going, despite the level of loss, really shows just how much of a remarkable woman she really is.

It was also important for me to write about their love because it was my way of getting to know my dad as well. I lost him when I was five, so there were so many things I didn't know about him. Through writing the book, I was able to interview so many people, I even interviewed my dad's childhood besties - people who went to high school with him. Up until that point I’d spent my entire life searching for my dad, but through writing this book I feel like I finally found him. The fact that my dad went from village to village, town to town, during the Biafran war, trying to track down my mum, says so much about the kind of person he was. He was kind of a joker as well – I mean, the fact that he went all the way to my mother's parent’s house in the north; he travelled for days under false pretenses, just because he wanted to see her again. That’s such a bold thing to do. It shows that he was head over heels, but it also shows his spirit and his personality. As I was writing about their love, I was discovering and showcasing who my dad really was. Who he was as a romantic partner, even at the age of 16, tells you so much about his spirit.

NA: It absolutely does, and it was so beautiful and heartwarming to read. You’ve already spoken about interviewing family and extended family, can you walk us through the rest of your writing process?

ZA: I started with a book proposal, so I had already had a clear structure. I knew that I wanted every chapter to have a different life lesson, or a parenting lesson, but rather than hitting it on the nose and telling you what to do, I was just going to showcase what my mother did using a particular story. I also knew that some of the lessons and some of the things that she did were quite extreme (like not letting me watch television for almost two years!) so having it start with the accident and the immediate aftermath was crucial for me because I wanted to make sure that the reader was armed with the information necessary to really understand where she was coming from and what led her to make those choices. 

Then I really had to synthesize the information and figure out what was important in terms of structure. I didn't include anything that wasn't necessary, so there's no aspect in the book where I'm like, I was born on a summer’s day – there’s none of that. In the news business, we call it ‘news you can use’ so in every single chapter, there's information for the reader to sort of take away and I think that's why the book has resonated with people so much – the fact that it’s not just a memoir and it can also be read as a guide.

It’s a short book and my journalism background was also very helpful because, in journalism, you really have to condense your articles down to pretty much the bare minimum. In TV news, you understand that people only have a certain amount of time, and most people have a relatively short attention span. You have to strip the information down to the raw ingredients and that's what I tried to boil it down to.

When it came to actually sitting down to write the book, I would spend maybe two or three weeks on a chapter, and then I would move on to the next. The first step was just about getting everything out, and it wouldn’t necessarily be readable, but piece by piece, I would start to make the words more beautiful and refined. But you have to start by getting everything out, and only then can you go back and edit.

NA: And finally, what advice would you give to someone who’s thinking about writing a memoir of their own one day?

ZA: I think my advice would be, two things. I’ll start by saying that the writing process is long. With nonfiction it probably takes at least two years from start to finish - from when you first put your pen to paper to when you have the book in your hands – and so you want to make sure that the time is spent in a very worthwhile way. Everyone has a story within them, I fully believe that, but the question is always which story. Which story is the right one for you to tell? One of the things that I really loved about my book and my writing process was that I wrote a story that nobody else could write. Nobody else on the planet could tell this story, and certainly not the way that I told it. It was 100% unique to me. So the first thing you have to ask yourself is whether or not the story is unique to you and whether it’s a story that only you could write. If the answer is yes, then you're onto something for sure.  

Then I would say, just write because whilst so many of us have a book within us, we procrastinate, we doubt ourselves, and we say we’ll do it next year but next year never comes. So once you’ve figured out that you have a story to tell, and that it’s a story that only you can tell, don’t overthink it - just write.

Zain Ejiofor Asher was born to first-generation Nigerian parents in South London. She was raised by her mother after losing her father in a tragic car accident when she was just five years old. A graduate of Oxford University and Columbia University, she is currently the anchor of One World with Zain Asher on CNN International.

You can read an excerpt of Where The Children Take Us here.