87felt similar emotions. And the loss of a
friend turned out to be a key moment
in her writing process, solidifying a
theme from her life that she knew had
to be part of the story. In 2017, a friend
of Tahir’s overdosed. “Everything
I witnessed around that incident—
confusion, shame, grief—it had a big
impact,” she says. “The book allowed
me to work out how I felt about things
that I’d experienced, but in a way that
didn’t feel overwhelming.”IN YA, wherever there’s darkness,
there must also be light. For the teens
in All My Rage, one source is faith.
Tahir aims to portray religion in the
most human way possible, showcasing
her characters’ evolving relationships
with God. For Noor and Salahudin,
Islam is at once a profound source of
comfort, an informal (and often funny)
daily practice, and an aspiration that
feels just out of reach. Tahir herself is
Muslim, and relates to her characters’
ever evolving feelings. “I defi nitely
don’t think I have it fi gured out,” she
says. But she does believe strongly that
religion should never be a burden: “It
was very important for me to show that
faith off ered these kids a way to feel a
little less alone.”
She hopes the book can help readers
feel seen. Sometimes it takes a grown-
up’s perspective to know the value of
that kind of peace. Last year, the au-
thor returned to the motel, for the fi rst
time since the mid-2000s, with her‘So many of us who feel
marginalized, we hold
all this anger inside’husband and two children. “I needed
to see it,” she says. “We went there and
my brain just went quiet.” She strug-
gled to fi nd the words to explain to her
kids what this place meant. So her hus-
band stepped in, telling them all sorts
of facts about the town, which made
her realize he’d done research of his
own. Looking out, Tahir’s mind circled
back to one thought: “It was crazy how
much it had remained the same,” she
says, “and how much I had changed.” MORE SPRING YA
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