Designed by Jaya Nicely for Unnamed Press.
[Fariha Róisín’s](https://www.instagram.com/fariha_roisin/) debut novel, [_Like A Bird_](https://www.amazon.com/Like-Bird-Fariha-R%C3%B3is%C3%ADn/dp/1951213440/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2F9R0W18VPOPG&keywords=like%20a%20bird&qid=1640616541&sprefix=like%20a%20bird%2Caps%2C114&sr=8-1), is dedicated to sexual assault survivors. Like Taylia, the protagonist of the book, Róisín is a survivor herself, and much of her work revolves around the long healing process it can sometimes take to feel comfortable in one’s body.
After her assault, Taylia, whose age is kept vague, is forced out of her home after her parents side with the assaulter. Her family dynamics have been tense and spoken about in lurid memories—she and her sister are half Indian and half white, but her parents clearly favor her sister, Alyssa, who is a lighter skin tone. Trapped in her sister’s shadow, Taylia begins to feel unworthy and self-critical, only exacerbated by her assault.
Through a chance encounter at a café, Taylia is able to find a home and a job with Kat, the shop’s owner, and expands her group to include people she cares about—and finally, who care about her. Taylia’s tough exterior from years of neglect is finally broken down, and through time, invites them to share her life. “I knew it was a good idea to bet on myself,” Taylia thinks, as she grows comfortable enough with herself.
Róisín’s debut novel is tender, warm, harsh at times, and full of life lessons told through a crucial coming-of-age-story.
_Flaunt_ sat down with the interdisciplinary writer to talk through the process of trauma and identity.
[@fariha\_roisin.](https://www.instagram.com/fariha_roisin/)
**So firstly, what caught my eye about this book was that it was written over the course of 18 years. When did this idea first start coming to you, and where was the so-called “finishing point” where you felt satisfied?**
You know, I will say something, and I can only say this for myself as a writer. I never feel like I arrive at a place of cessation, I’m not like, ‘Oh, yes! I’m happy.’ I think the truth of the story is that there’s always more and it’s really the skill of a writer and editor to figure out how to contain it in 250 pages. You know, the desired outcome is there. You as a reader are immersed in the world that I’ve created and I hope, through that journey, you can process many different things.
But yeah, I think there’s an artfulness of being, like, ‘Okay, I could say more, but I’m not going to.’ It’s like seeing something as a holistic thing. I had to eventually get to that place with the book. As for writing it… I feel like I’ve always written because I felt so misunderstood by the world around me and I needed to understand myself, so the page became a place where I could do that.
**Taylia’s background is rich and diverse: Her Jewish mother is from New York and her father is from India, the latter is an integral part of her identity. Is this part of Taylia also borne out of your experiences?**
Yeah. I'm a mixed child—I was born in Canada and raised in Australia, and now I live in Los Angeles. I’m a very global, third-world kid, and I think that kind of dissonance of being of many different places is something we don’t really explore in a more philosophical sense. What does it mean to have parents that don’t really love themselves and therefore you, because they haven’t accepted parts of themselves and their identity? So that was really important for me to show how her parents, and their similar desires to assimilate or be normal—or what they believe is normal—how that gravely impacted Taylia in her own acceptance of her own identity and herself.
**The book explores so many things: Immigration, racism, sexual assault, feminism, friendship, and loneliness, just to name a few. How did all of these ideas come together, and how was navigating all of this?**
Well, I mean, all of us are so complex but in a day-to-day world, we want to engage with one another in a very conventional, scripted way, when in fact, how we are with ourselves and how we are with the people closest to us—that’s what really interests and intrigues me. I want to know, I want to read, I want to see those kinds of conversations. It was really important for me to have Kat and Tahsin and have these complex friendships where they had their own ecosystems and lives and reality and universe. It wasn’t just Taylia’s life, she was contending with personalities around her and I think that’s the thing that has made me grow the most in my life. I’m not just an aesthetic person; I’m here for depth and here for connection.
I’m also a survivor, so those elements of sexual assault, they’re living realities for me. I don’t even think when I started writing the book at twelve I even had an awareness of my own traumas, but I was clearly finding a way to exorcise them and find meaning in my own life. I think when you experience pretty tragic and traumatic things at a young age, it makes you very perceptive to life and to humans and I would consider myself a very good test of character. Especially now in my 30s, having to learn the hard way of how people are.
I’ve really transmuted a lot of that emotion and pain and rage and joy and excitement and love and tenderness, all of those feelings I’ve learned through connection and relationships and entering a relationship with a partner who doesn’t love me. All of these layers, I can bring them to the page, and I think those are the most important stories, you know, when you can learn or at least be reflected in the totality of what you experience on a day-to-day.
[@fariha\_roisin.](https://www.instagram.com/fariha_roisin/)
[**For i\_D**](https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/a34gaj/after-years-of-white-washing-fariha-roisin-finally-feels-free-to-be-herself)**, you wrote “I grew up in Australia, where white women were put on pedestals, and where a specific kind of beauty is commodified… I started “dieting” at twelve. I was obsessed with white-washing myself”. In the book, Taylia reflects a lot on her Indian heritage, but she’s also upset with the way that her parents treat Alyssa, her sister who has a lighter skin tone. Was it ever hard to write about these experiences?**
No, because I think all of the crumbs of any artist’s work exist in anything they do, right? So I think it just speaks to how important these themes are in my life. I need to mirror myself, because I think… My life, and so much of my writing was birthed from a place of loneliness—I don’t really feel understood by anybody—and it’s not like I’m here at 32 telling you this and I’m like, pretty happy—I’m content, I moved passed a lot of the wounding of my early years and continuously finding myself in relationships. Kind of like how Taylia finds herself with Ky, somebody who is unwilling to give her everything she needs and she doesn’t even have the language for what she needs. So that’s what makes it complicated. She’s like, ‘Well, this is love, because this person desires me,’ which was a huge, huge, thing I had to unlearn. You know, desire is not the same thing as love.
I think I’m kind of in conversation with myself throughout these different mediums, of being like, ‘Hey, what do you think about this, still?’ It’s kind of cool to be in constant conversation with yourself, in an article, or in an essay, or in a book, because that’s where I find myself. I find myself through myself. I find I’m less lonely through my experience.
**Humans are so complex and there’s an infinite number of things to go through. I’m a psychology major and I read about this study where self-disclosing traumatic events initially leads to negative mood but over time leads to feeling better.**
To that point, exactly, for the most part, I’ve noticed, humans are much more willing to live in denial than they are to actually face it. They think that the early uncomfortability of having to sit with it is the feeling it’s always gonna be, but actually, we don’t consider how much space it leaves you to actually evolve and shift and change, and actually gain something from the experience. My trauma therapist readily reminds me ‘You didn’t have to go through this to learn these lessons,’ but I think there’s something powerful in transmuting trauma.
**Taylia’s age was vague throughout the story, so all of her experiences are viewed through a different kind of lens—her life has been filled with hardships and the way she reacts is mostly mature, though she seems young. What’s the effect this has on her story?**
Yeah! Nobody’s pointed that out to me. So, I’m 32 but I look like I’m 17. I get it all the time, people are like, ‘Are you serious?’ And I sound very young. I understand that we live in a very deeply misogynistic world that doesn’t actually make room for anybody’s femininity or femmeness. So for me, I think it’s really trying to… Again, bring in the complexity. She’s a very layered person. Let’s let her be layered, let’s let her be fucked up, let’s let her be annoying. She’s all of those things, you know? I mean, people have told me—a lot of people have told me—that Taylia annoys them. And I’m like, ‘That’s great! I don’t know what to tell you.’
I think so much of that self-reckoning; somebody who’s really depressed or in a lot of darkness—those spaces are not allowed because we assume that, because everybody’s faking it, all that you have to do is fake it! And the people that choose not to are the problem, when in fact, we’re beginning to understand that we’ve been socialized in a way to accept all of the societal, governmental, and institutional violence that we’ve been kept pretty suppressed and denied the right to actually feel things.
Something that was really clarifying about the pandemic was that grief was so present. So you could talk about it—the early stages of the pandemic, there was so much grief, globally, and we connected to that. I felt very safe in that. I’m an incredibly elastic person; I can move through emotions really fast. It saddens me how little women in literature and film have the potentiality to be many different things, multidimensional. I really wanted to bring that to Taylia—all the characteristics of myself that I feel like I’ve been denied or feel like I’ve had to feel shame towards. I wanted her to just be in those things.
**Taylia’s life is filled with many people, Kat, Ky, and later, Tahsin, who try to help her work through her trauma, though Taylia resists. Is it because she’s been trusting of people and burned before?**
Yeah. And also, you know, her not trusting Kat, I think it’s really interesting because it’s not that she distrusts Kat, it’s that she needs her too much. She’s just like, ‘I can’t jeopardize this relationship.’ I’ve just seen this, again, in my own interpersonal relationships—you end up trusting the wrong people and not the right ones. I really wanted to showcase that as well.
[@fariha\_roisin.](https://www.instagram.com/fariha_roisin/)
**A major theme of the book is that, after her sexual assault, Taylia doesn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. As she meets more people and broadens her support group, though, she learns to be herself again. The idea reminded me of Maggie Rogers’ song** [**“Back in My Body,”**](https://genius.com/Maggie-rogers-back-in-my-body-lyrics) **where she comes around to being confident to make her own choices. How was it to write a full story arc for this character?**
That’s a beautiful question—so I didn’t work consistently on the story the entire \[18 years\]. I worked on it from like 12 to 15, then pause, then 19 to 23, pause for a couple of years, then when I was trying to sell it, from 27 to 30. So, a lot of significant chapters in my life. I’m a very intuitive person, so I did a lot of those things intuitively. I was like, ‘Okay, I feel like I need to work on this book again.’ It was always a thing I knew, even when I was twelve, I didn’t think I was going to be a writer, but I was like, ‘This is something that I will publish.’ And I felt that I would find a way, and I did.
But yeah, I’m a child sexual abuse survivor—It’s been a huge reckoning I’ve had since I’ve sold the book—I didn’t actually remember my memories; I had extracted them from myself. In emotional preparation for _How to Cure a Ghost_, my first book, I kind of lost my mind. I lost everything—I was in a long partnership, I lost that partnership, work wasn’t going well. I’m very much an artist that despite having a relative amount of success, not coming from money and not having those ways of being able to sustain myself and has made my career is immensely hard and difficult to continue, but I have. I think that has been the biggest reckoning of the experiences of these two books coming out—throughout my life, I’ve never really understood why I had so much darkness, why I had all these feelings.
I dreamt _Like a Bird_ when I was 12. That’s how the story came to me, through a dream. Now, through all of the research and trauma therapy I’ve done, I can understand why I was the way I was and how I was processing. I’m very much publicly healing. I’m publicly realizing these things and publicly writing about them. So it’s very strange. And I feel like it’s destiny—I feel like I’m destined to do this work. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. So, yeah, I think that the act of embodiment or coming back to your body, I think about that a lot because so much of my healing as a child sexual abuse survivor is trying to connect to a body that was never mine. Losing that agency at such a young age sort of traps you at that place and you’re forever kind of—that’s how you move. So I was always like, giving too much, or people pleasing, all of these things come back to my abuse. It’s been very interesting to learn how to scoop myself back up again, and be like, ‘No this isn’t mine, this is yours.’ And blurring what a boundary is, which is fucking huge, like, ‘Oh my God! I need boundaries. It’s actually not a good thing to give too much.’ It’s like beginning to mother myself, and learn all of that infrastructure that I think good parenting gives you. I’ve had to develop that on my own.
So I think all of those are acts of becoming and acts of coming back to yourself and being back in your body, but it’s not an arrived state. It’s not a stagnant state. You know, I’m gonna fall off again. It’s the nature of life. We want to be cured. The whole wellness industrial complex is based on this idea that you can be well. Actually, we can’t. We live in a very unwell society, and what if wellness is really accepting that everybody deserves to be honest and frank about their limitations and trauma and pain and bodies and it’s the responsibility of others that potentially have had a better life to make space for that, to care about people and the things that have happened to their bodies. I think that's kind of what I’m working towards. To me, true embodiment is embodiment in society and collectively shifting.
**You seem to have covered many bases as a writer: You have a poetry collection, _How to Cure A Ghost_, a guided journal, _Being in Your Body_, and now a debut novel with _Like a Bird._ What’s next?**
So my next book comes out July 2022. It’s called _Who Is Wellness For?_ It’s my first nonfiction and it’s about the wellness industrial complex. So it’s part memoir, part investigative journalism and critical thinking about the wellness world. And then, I have my fifth book, and my second book of poetry, _Survival Takes A Wild Imagination_, and that’s also in the works. I finished it and now we’re trying to get it out into the world. And then I have a work of nonfiction—another book of essays I’m working on—and I have another novel idea as well that eventually I want to get to, but I’m doing a lot at once.
I’m really grateful that I've been given the chance and the life where I can actually have my hands in many different projects and be able to make my dreams come true. It’s such an honor to be a storyteller.
[_Like A Bird_](https://www.unnamedpress.com/books/book?title=Like%20A%20Bird) is available now.
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