Sabaa Tahir Reveals 'All My Rage'

International best-selling author, Sabaa Tahir, talks to us about her seventh published book, All My Rage. “So All My Rage is a contemporary novel, as opposed to a fantasy. It is following the story of two characters, three characters, actually. The main two are Noor and Salahudin. They are two young kids growing up in the Mojave Desert, and the third story line is Misbah, who is Salahudin’s mother, and we follow her starting in Pakistan and then journey with her across the sea to America. This story is about these two kids, growing up in this place that seems to want to destroy them, and how they survived all these difficult things that one of those should be too much for a child but they have to deal with multiple everything, from Noor who wants to go to college but has an uncle who won’t let her, and that’s her guardian, to Sal who is trying to run his parent’s business after his mother gets ill and ends up finding that it’s much more difficult than he had anticipated.”

Tahir went on to speak about her inspiration for writing All My Rage, which she has described as the book of her heart. The concept for the story began in the early 2000’s, during which she experienced some of the same events that her characters went through. She explained that the motel from the story was inspired by the motel where she grew up, and that years later when she had gone off to college, her father became ill and her mother had to sell the motel. Tahir wasn’t able to say goodbye and get closure on her childhood home so she decided to start writing about the many emotions she went through during that time, which became the genesis of this book.

For Tahir, one of her goals when creating her stories is for her readers to relate to and see themselves in the characters she writes about, especially those on the outer edges or trying to sort through their own emotional struggles. She said, “My hope is I will always write about characters who look like me, always. That is sort of why I write. It’s so whatever kid or adult feels like they that haven’t been represented yet, that they don’t necessarily have a place in this world, they’ll pick up a book and they’ll say, ‘oh that’s me.’ … because I didn’t get that as a young person. I didn’t feel like I was in any books that I read and I don’t want that to happen to young people. Now I don’t think it should.”