Everything Is Content - Nussaibah Younis - Everything In Conversation

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Happy Hump Day EIC heads - we've got another author special for you!Our beloved Beth is ill, so she’s resting up, but Ruchira & Oenone are holding the fort and they’ve got an amazing interview for you with debut novelist Dr Nussaibah Younis.Nussaibah is a peace-building practitioner and a globally recognised expert on contemporary Iraq, and even advised the Iraqi government on humanitarian issues. We are talking to her about her debut novel Fundamentally, a book we all adored FYI, and Stylist’s debut book of the year, which is out now. 'A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with an insane job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.'Follow Nussaibah on Instagram @nussaibahyounis and pick up your copy of Fundamentally here or in any good book shop! If there’s anyone else you want us to chat to- drop us a line @everythingiscontentpod. O, R, B x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Richera and I'm Anoni and this is Everything in Conversation. Our beloved Beth is ill this week which is sad so she's resting up but don't worry we've got an amazing interview for you today with debut novelist Dr Naseba Younis. Naseba is a peace building practitioner and a globally recognized expert on contemporary Iraq and even advised the Iraqi government on humanitarian issues. We're talking to her today about her debut novel Fundamentally, a book we all adored FYI and Stylist's debut book of the year which is out now. Also it is so funny, that's the thing we have to stress, this is the funniest book we've read in a while. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram at everything everything is content pod and make sure you hit follow on your podcast player so you never miss an episode so i think it's fair to say we are both so excited to talk

about fundamentally but we have always asked our guests what content have you been loving and just to let you know we accept anything from books to film to tv to tiktoks to literally anything obviously i've been watching traitors like everyone else all the twist i have to say i loved the twist with giving the most stupid person there the privilege of being a seer oh my god whoever is devising weirdly working out I think it's been a really entertaining season and it's just one of those things where because my sister's watching it at the same time um it's just always a fun thing it's a fun show to talk about with somebody else so yeah I'm loving it I love that we actually did we did one of our episodes and we did a section on the traitors and we were saying it's so interesting

to watch because actually it tends to be like the less intelligent people that do really really well on the show and the very very smart ones go like almost immediately I know it's because it's well because people are so suspicious of them they're like but you seem like you'd be able to really manipulate this situation so I just don't trust you yeah I mean having said that um Alex is still there who was a British diplomat and who actually went to Oxford with me I think he was in my year you're joking yeah well I actually had no recollection of this until I went to my friend's birthday the other day and everyone was like, do you remember Alex Dragonetti? And I was like, oh yeah, is that him? Oh my God.

But, so yeah, he's made it quite far and he's definitely smart. I love him. His facial expressions, his meme-ability is unlike anyone I've seen in this series. Like when he fell into that bush playing, what was it, like squash or something? I nearly cried. That was such a good moment also I was asking my friends I was like who goes from being a British diplomat to being on a reality show like the traces but and then my friend was like you've literally gone from a job where you were supposed to be de-radicalizing Isis Bride and you've written like the filthiest comedy novel. She was like, if anyone can understand Alex's choices, it's you. Oh my God. I love that. Well, on that note, let's get into Fundamentally because

we loved it. I read it last year and I'd gone through a period where I was just really bad at reading and I was so devastated when I finished it because I loved it so much that it really got me back in. But for people who haven't read Fundamentally yet, could you tell us all about it and what it's about? Yes, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Thanks so much for reading. Fundamentally follows Nadia, who's a heartbroken academic based in London, and just totally unable to cope with her messy breakup. She accepts a job in Iraq, quite on a whim. And that job is with the UN. And they want her to create a de-radicalization program for ISIS brides. Now, Nadia's done like bits and pieces of research, but she really does not know what she's doing. So she arrives at the UN compound

in Baghdad, and is just surrounded by a cast of hilarious nutters. And she's trying to forge her way through this chaos. And then when she goes to the refugee camp, and she meets Sara, a young ISIS bride who joined ISIS when she was just 15. Nadia feels such a connection with her because she realises that had a few things gone differently in her own life, that she could have ended up in Sarah's position. So she becomes very devoted to saving Sarah, whether or not Sarah wants to be saved. That was a gorgeous summarisation. Thank you. Also, you also touched on this a little bit, but your own experience in terms of advising the Iraqi government in terms of working on de-radicalisation sounds so fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that

informed this book? Yeah, it was crazy, because I'd actually been working in Iraq for a long time. So I'd come in more as a political specialist my PhD had been on more the political process and I'd been sort of advising governments around post-ISIS reconciliation and radical the process of radicalization and thinking about some of the foreign brides it's actually something I hadn't really thought about since I was young myself and since I was a very practicing Muslim and so it kind of came as a bit of surprise because I was working on a totally different project and then somebody who advises the Iraqi government was saying to me we've got a big problem with all these women, primarily women and children,

who were stuck in refugee camps because their countries or their communities don't want them to come home because they're worried that they're connected with ISIS. But actually, we don't really have any evidence that they did anything wrong. And so there were questions about whether we could have some kind of programme that would assess whether or not these women were radical, actually primarily to make the communities feel more confident in accepting them back. but more because you know we didn't actually think they needed to be in the camps but there was such resistance locally in the communities to letting them out and so it was a bit of a it was a bit of a long shot and there was a thought experiment so there's lots of planning and lots of meetings and thinking about it and in the end the my my sort of proposed program never never took off and so it was quite fun to turn to the novel

and have this thought experiment. Well, what would have happened if I'd gone through with it? And if a program like that would have taken place? What are all of the shenanigans and the nonsense that would have gone down? And what are all the most extreme ways it could have gone wrong? So in the book, Nadia, the protagonist feels quite out of her depth when it comes to faced with like leading a team, even though she's like written so much about it. She's so on the academic side, but in the actual practice of it, she finds it very daunting. Is that something that you experience in terms of academia versus the real life of going into something? Yeah, I do think it's so funny. And

I do think it's also one of the ways in which the book is very relatable, because you might not have been tasked with de-radicalising ISIS brides in Baghdad, but everyone's had a first day at work where they didn't know what they were doing and were sort of afraid to ask. And so I think you get that real uncomfortable, cringy, relatableness when you watch Nadia show up in Iraq and have no idea how she is going to put this programme together. And, yeah, I really enjoyed writing about that because I think there are so many instances where sort

of foreign experts come into a country that's not really their own country and believe that they have something unique and special to sort of impart when actually they're so ignorant of the context in which they're operating in and it's so easy to get things wrong which is why we have a horrendous track record in achieving anything with our foreign interventions because it's harder than it seems and it seems hard that makes me laugh so much that you're so right there's a relatability to the book but also I kept getting reminded of how the stakes are just so different it's not like me turning up to my you know bullshit laptop kind of like startup company whatever it's like she's literally doing something so important

but she's feeling the same feelings that I've felt at various points in my life it is yeah I think that's such a great thing about this book and I just wanted to make the UN which is such a sort of rarefied and distant institution, I wanted to make that feel really accessible for readers, because it's just, it's something we don't get to see on the inside very often. And actually, the UN, a lot of these big international institutions, international sort of NGOs, are just workplaces staffed with people who have personal problems and people who are trying to get ahead, who want to protect their budgets, who want to get a promotion, who are having conflicts with other people at work. But also when you're working in a dangerous country, often you are put in a

sort of compound situation where you're living and working and socialising and sleeping with your colleagues. And so that blurring of the boundaries between the professional and the personal, and almost creating that sort of college campus type environment, I think allowed for so much fun and so much humour, but also so much life in the story and so much humanity in it. It was such a bizarre experience, the idea of like living and spending that much time with your colleagues. I don't know. Yeah, I don't think that was particularly relatable, but it was very fascinating. You know, for those of us who've been to university and lived, mean I went to a very you know small claustrophobic university town where you're constantly bumping into the same people over and over again and it

becomes incestuous very quickly and you know and you're maybe doing lectures and classes with the same people and what's nice about having that sort of precinct or college campus setting is it allows you to create intimacy very quickly. And it allows for unhinged behaviour to seem normal, that you wouldn't normally get away with in a place of work. So yeah, it was a really fun device for me in the book. One question I have also is, it feels like it would have been a really obvious move for you to maybe write a memoir or a non-fiction book on your experiences what drew you to fiction in particular oh I wanted people to read it that's the truth of it I yeah I did think you know I was offered a book deal for my PhD

and um I sat down and I was like oh I know the 10 people who are going to read this book, and they're just my colleagues, my sort of fellow experts in, you know, Iraqi foreign policy between 2003 and 2011. You know, when you write nonfiction, it can be very difficult to get a very mainstream audience. And because the topic of ISIS brides and whether or not they should have a right to return is such a topic of public debate, actually beyond just a narrow intellectual class, it's actually something that has captured the public imagination

that a lot of people have an opinion on despite not understanding necessarily the the political context not understand not having um an understanding of the emotional truth and reality of the experience and so i wanted to write something that was fun and easy to read and enjoyable to read so that the widest possible audience could really engage with it. And so, yeah, that was really my goal. That was something I wanted to ask because you really don't shy away. Obviously, it's like an area of your expertise, but from the kind of like thorny, very complicated, nuanced thing, which is radicalization. And especially

through Sarah, I think you help us to understand or like challenge our understanding of what like radicalization is, or just into ISIS or other fringe groups. And as you said, like in the UK, I think that we've got a terrible history of not allowing kind of two truths to exist at the same time. And with Sarah's character, I think there is a bit of that going on were you ever worried that about people's reception because it is a really accessible book it's so enjoyable but obviously it has these really serious threads to it which as you say are completely divisive and have caused many an argument front page debate was there any part of you that was like oh this is going to get some people really riled up I think that the book doesn't tell you what you have to think about this debate

it just tells you super honestly about a character and that character is flawed that character is not an angel but is also vulnerable and is also very young. And talks like you talked when you were 15 years old and you were a moron and you saw everything in black and white and you thought you knew better than your elders. So what she is, is a very human and very relatable person who you have a chance to get to know and it's up to you what you think the consequences should be of the decisions that she made what I wanted to do was make was to give people a chance to really get to know somebody warts and all to get to hang out with them while they tell dirty jokes to get to know them as a as a character and as a personality in a holistic way instead of just as a headline, whether that's a positive headline or a negative headline. I think Sarah in

the book, the young ISIS bride, she fully claims her agency. She has such a powerful voice. She resists Nadia and everyone's attempts to place a narrative onto her. She's the queen of the clapback. She's witty. She's always got another thing. You know, she's always has the last word. And I think you just have a chance to really get to know her. But then what you choose to think about that and how you make meaning of it is very much up to you. One thing that's really clear having read the book is just how much humor there is. And I've got two questions for you. One, was it quite shocking to, you know, pitch this book and with the themes of de-radicalization and radicalization,

and also be pitching it and saying no it's going to be comic it's going to be very funny whilst also exploring those really heavy themes and then secondly I read online that you took uh stand-up comedy as part of the writing process and I have to hear more about that what made you do that I'm a huge fan of comedy. And I very much see this book as part of a wider tradition of British satire. So I grew up watching shows like In the Thick of It, W1A, even older shows like sort of Yes Minister, In the Loop, all that sort of Armando Iannucci sort of canon. I absolutely love how powerfully satire can skewer the failures of our institutions whilst also providing a genuinely entertaining experience. And my goal was always to try my absolute hardest to do that

and to do that for the UN. And I also love stand-up. I and so and I also love stand-up I just enjoy I love watching stand-up I'm not great at doing stand-up which is I really prefer to write my jokes down and then edit them 15 times um but yeah I thought what the hell it'll be fun to go to a stand-up course and to make me really think long and hard about what are all of the jokes I can tell in this book, what are all the funny situations that have happened in my career and also I mean I'm the kind of person who I definitely can just sit here and make myself laugh and if I told somebody else the joke they would be like that is not funny at all so sometimes it's really worth

doing a sense check with a class of actual comedians to see whether your jokes are landing or not um so yeah I just I did two stand-up comedy courses at the Bill Murray in Angel and it was so so much fun and so helpful and I sort of treated the course quite differently to everyone else because everyone else was there to create sort of a type 5 or a type 10 so they were telling the same stories over and over again to prepare for doing them on the open mic circuit and I would just come in with new jokes every week and be like, is this funny? Yes. Okay. Putting that in the book.

Is this funny? But yeah, I thought it was really fun and it helped me to just really put the humor of the book like absolutely front and center, which is where I wanted it to be. You absolutely achieved that. It's so funny. I really was laughing out loud and that is really hard for a book to make you do. I just thought it was exceptional and the tone of it was so great and I really loved Nadia and yeah loved how filthy she was I loved the thing is it is obviously a stance me a book about Isis brides but it's also about being a woman it's about sexuality I loved um yeah the way that she

approaches sex in the book is what I found really interesting and her body there was there was there's so much in there to get your teeth into beyond you know the kind of main themes of it um and I was going to ask you about the writing process and what made you come to the book but it sounds like you were offered a non-fiction book and you were like right I know where I'm going now this is going to be this book so um I was offered a non-fiction book deal a long time ago when I finished my PhD. After that, I went off and had a whole career in Iraq. And when I was working on the on the de-radicalization issue, and when I realized how much I identified with some of the young women who'd been radicalized in their teenage years.

I thought there was quite a funny central relationship that I could really write a novel around, which is this kind of bitchy, argumentative, but also quite fun and intimate friendship between an older woman in her 30s who's working for the UN and a teenage girl from East London who, you know, has joined ISIS and who both are absolutely certain that they're right, but who also have a great sense of humour and who also really get each other in lots of different ways and who are just so much more human than we normally see. And once I had that idea, I put it to the back of my mind because I thought, God, I can't write honestly about the UN

and the world of international aid and do it in the way I want to do it without blowing up my career. So I had to be, and I didn't want to pull punches and I didn't want to write something half arsed so I just waited until I was like do you know what I think I'm maybe done with Baghdad and so maybe it's time to go and write that book and um you know burn all my bridges and see if I can't launch a different career. Did that so did that feel like a massive risk then when you really or were you like do you know what I think this I've got it now were you really prepared I literally

like was in Baghdad in a hotel and I had started writing the novel and I was gonna and I'd saved up some money to take some time off to to finish writing and I bumped into a colleague of mine at this hotel and he was like oh should we do a joint project together on whatever and I said if you ever see me in Baghdad again it's because I've failed oh my gosh well I don't I think absolutely this is gonna be I have never been back woo no I spent long enough there and it's and I do think it's important for people to leave once they start getting jaded because I think you do have to have an insane and naive optimism to to get anything achieved in the world of um humanitarian work I really wanted to talk about

Nadia and the fact I mean I loved how she was both queer and also has an experience of changing relationship to faith and that was something that I found really poignant and very relatable and I was wondering if you tell me a little bit about coming up with her and having those elements throughout the book yeah I absolutely love messy female leads and I really wanted to have just a chaotic and messy female character because you know no matter what job you do and the sort of professional face that you put on at work you know in your sort of late 20s early 30s there's also a lot of stuff going on in people's personal lives and sometimes that can bleed over and I don't believe in having fiction tell only part of the story yeah I'm super

interested in Nadia's professional life but I also want to know how she's feeling and what she's coping with and and all of the emotion she's showing up at that job with because it's becomes really important to how she's projecting Nadia really projects onto Sarah the Isis bride um you know many of the the sort of problems and deficiencies in other relationships she's had so she's seeking to heal something in herself and using Sarah to do it and in doing, it's not really seeing Zara necessarily for who she is. And I really loved kind of Fleabag as time in a woman's life where relationships can become like such an important part of somebody's emotional landscape and can bleed over into everything else as can relationships with parents and how people are sort of either setting up a life for themselves or failing to do that. And so for Nadia, Nadia has lost her faith.

And because her mother's very attached to her faith still, that has caused a very big rupture in her relationship with her mother. And similarly, Sarah, the ISIS bride, has also had a rupture with her parents, with whom she really struggled to connect. She struggled to connect with as a teenager. And what I wanted the book to show is how that foundational damage in that core relationship with your parents and your home,

how that can manifest in unhealthy behaviours. And so for Nadia, that's the pursuit of endless codependent relationships like a reviewer described her as being horny for everyone she meets and she's and then for Sarah you know her response to that is is to you know become very devoted to quite a fundamentalist version of her faith but actually the foundational trauma is the same and I wanted to show that that you know whatever is that kind of core pain or wound that we're running from the way we cope with it can manifest differently but it doesn't mean that the kind of initial cause isn't something that we can all understand and a lot of us have felt it's so

interesting and I think radicalization as well across the board is, I mean, we're seeing it so much with young men kind of being radicalized into like the manosphere. You know, this translates into so many other areas than just one specific place. And I think to read about it and to have characters that are able to show empathy. And again, looking at these reasons why people do turn to extreme views to find safety or comfort or belonging. I think it's such an interesting thing to read and I was wondering what do you hope for the book is just for people to get that 360 view and a better understanding rather than what we're usually fed by tabloids

and people like I don't know Nigel Farage yeah I mean, I really believe that like novels should be entertaining. And I want people to be laughing out loud on the tube and to be embarrassing themselves by laughing in public and to have that feeling of just wanting to turn another page and just actually enjoying the experience and not feeling like it's something they have to do, it's something they want to do. So that's like kind of the first goal. And then beyond that, it's something they have to do it's something they want to do so that's like kind of the first goal and then beyond that it's really about having um it's about giving somebody some version of an emotional experience that helps them to understand another person another character i think that's what fiction can do so well fiction can really put you into another person's life

and you briefly live it for a little bit and you kind of feel what they feel and you think what they think. And I do think it gives you kind of an unparalleled access to empathy compared to any other art form. So yeah, I hope it does that. It definitely will.

I agree. It definitely 100% will. I also have to know, what are some of the books that have inspired you throughout your life what are some of the kind of written pieces or even films pieces of culture that to this day are like your top top piece of culture oh there are so many wonderful books that so actually some very old school books I I do love I love the humour and the wit of Oscar Wilde.

I love Evelyn Waugh. So Evelyn Waugh wrote a book called Scoop, which was a satire of British and international war journalists. And they go to this kind of fake country called Ishmaelia. And they're all sort of

searching for a war to report on back for the broadsheets at home. And it's just a completely hilarious and mad escapade. And it's very funny and feels actually very relatable. Still, people kind of working, because I was around a lot of journalists, but also just with people going and working abroad and not having any idea what they're really doing. That I found very inspirational. Also,

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim. Lucky Jim is such a funny and it was such an inspiration for some of the humour in this book around how silly academia can be. I had to take some of that out because I had quite a lot of academia jokes that my my writing friends were like yeah nobody cares about this um but um yeah Lucky Jim is so funny it's just about you know um I think he's a postdoc a postdoctoral fellow who's trying to get a lectureship and it just rubbish at his job and just keeps getting into kind of hapless situations. And it's that sort of vulnerable central character going from one disaster to another. David Lodge had a hilarious book called the British Museum is Falling Down which is just a huge joke about like how useless you are as a PhD student it's like a lot of that older generation of kind of um traditional British satirical humor that I really enjoyed and then what I feel like

I've what I feel like I've brought to that tradition is the tradition of the absolutely batshit horny chaotic woman which is from much more like contemporary fiction so there's an amazing book by Melissa Broder called Milk Fed which is just um such an extreme and amazing and hilarious character portrait of a woman working in LA who hates her job and is like obsessed with her weight and then has this insane relationship with a very overweight like orthodox Jewish character and she's like a secular Jewish character. And so there's an exploration of a body image, of sexuality, of lesbianism, of mother-daughter relationships and belonging to a faith.

So all of that kind of amazing, boundary-less, intense exploration of what it is to be a woman today and to explore all of those different different um facets of a woman's life and adding that to a kind of more stylized Evelyn Moore type satire of an institution that's what I wanted to do is sort of bring those two things together that list of recommendations is so good i've only read i think i've only read bride's head revisited from evelyn moore i've realized i've just given you a lot of recommendations of like dead white male characters writers

so i also love parini shroff who wrote bandit queens, which is hilarious. Hilarious book set in India about this group of women who are together in a microfinance committee and who want to murder their husbands. Much hilarity ensues. But there's also a really interesting meditation on sort of gender relations and sexual violence. And Zaina Arafat wrote a book called You Exist Too Much, which is such a beautiful and painful meditation

on the relationship between an immigrant mother and a second generation daughter. And that is very beautiful. There's so much interesting sort of British Arab, British Asian and American diaspora writing that has also really inspired me well it's been the biggest treat to talk to you I genuinely mean it when I say I was banging on because I think I got a copy before the girls and I was like guys you need to read this book I'm absolutely obsessed it's so funny and I've recommended it to everyone I've

been talking about it constantly so I just know that it's going to be such a huge success. I really appreciate it I really appreciate your support it like all these things make a difference and like you guys have such an amazing platform and just trying to get the word out about the book is so hard um so yeah thanks so much for supporting it. Just to mirror Anoni I think it's going to be a really big deal and I can't wait to see people's response I think it'll be amazing. I hope so. Thank you so much, girls. Thank you so much for listening this week.

Make sure you go and read Fundamentally ASAP, which is out now in all good book retailers. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please do leave us a rating. Or if you really want to spoil us, a review on your podcast app. Five stars, please. Please also follow us on Instagram and TikTok at everythingiscontentpod. See you next week. Bye. you