Salma Hussain Interviews Sima Qadeer

(Northwestern University Press, 2026)

Sima Qadeer

Today, I have the pleasure – and the privilege – of introducing my interview with Sima Qadeer, author of Brown Girls, Grown Up. This remarkable debut collection is a bold and unflinching exploration of the lives of South Asian Muslim women as they navigate marriage, motherhood, autonomy, identity, and the expectations placed upon them.

This interview was conducted primarily via email, and I am deeply grateful to Sima for her generosity, her time, and the care and thoughtfulness she brought to each of her responses. It was a genuine pleasure to engage with her work and her insights, and I look forward to reading many more stories from her.

Salma Hussain: Sexual dissatisfaction appears as an important and consistent theme throughout the collection. Why was it important for you to use sexual dissatisfaction as a means to explore identity, autonomy, and emotional fulfillment in this collection?

Sima Qadeer: It’s interesting because this question has actually come up quite often when I’ve been asked about my intent with the book. Sexual dissatisfaction, and the exploration of it, was not an explicit intent. For me, it was more a reflection of what I was seeing and hearing from women in my age group in general. Sexual dissatisfaction is part of the conversation but for so many reasons – feeling emotionally disengaged from your partner, life fatigue, or not feeling good in your own body.

But what I think is surprising is not that these stories or narratives exist, but rather that these types of stories have rarely been told through the lens of South Asian Muslim women. That doesn’t mean that these events, conversations, impulses, and thoughts aren’t happening behind closed doors.

For me, if I was going to explore the inner lives of middle-aged women and be honest about it, it didn’t make sense not to write about sex. It’s such a huge part of being human.

The sexual experiences and frustrations are part of their identity and how they choose to exercise their autonomy, of which sexual agency is a significant part.

It’s not the whole story, but it is a part of it. I don’t think these stories are radically different from anyone else’s. It’s simply that they are being told.

SH: I am curious how long you sat with these stories. When did you begin to conceive of these stories, and what was their path to publication?

SQ: I actually didn’t sit with a mapped-out idea of these stories or how the collection would flow until I was halfway into it. What sat with me was the desire, the need, the want to write a collection of stories that centered South Asian Muslim women who are also “Canadianized.”

I’m a pantser. I didn’t write by an outline or a structure. My process was to sit down, try to treat it as a nine-to-five. I would put my headphones on. I had my playlist because music is a big part of my writing and my creative process.

I knew several things. It was going to be a collection of short stories, and the characters, to a degree, would look like me insofar as they would be middle-aged, Pakistani, Canadian, Muslim, and female. What emerged is reflective of so many things that women in this group are experiencing.

I didn’t see me out there—stories that reflected the experiences and people that we’ve become beyond our coming-of-age period. Immigrants who have come of age in Canada have had to navigate so much, whether it’s faith, culture, or race, while negotiating their relationships—from their partners to their parents to their children to their siblings—taking care of those they love while trying to take care of themselves, at the same time trying to find out where they fit into all of it, what their place is, and how they get there.

Women in this group are ripe with stories.

I would explore these themes that perhaps began as nuggets of reality, but ultimately these are stories of fiction. I took the little nuggets that I was observing, that were in my own life or others around me, and I extrapolated them until they evolved into the stories they eventually became.

I had no idea I would get published. The entire process, from writing down my first word to actually holding the first physical copy of my book, took years. There were breaks in between: COVID, a skiing accident that resulted in a significant concussion for me, and my ailing mother. But I kept returning to writing.

The path to publication was honestly very uneven. I had the amazing luck of signing on with the first agent that I submitted my manuscript to. The path to finding a publisher, though, was rockier. Feedback was generally positive, but what I learned very quickly was that short story collections are a hard sell. Short story collections by a debut author are an even harder sell. Someone would really have to love the collection to take it on.

And that person ended up being Marisa Siegel, who acquired my book while she was at Northwestern University Press. I feel the universe took the book on the path it was supposed to take because it ended up with exactly the right editor.

SH: Several stories seem to explore the gap between the lives women are expected to live and the lives they secretly desire. What are the questions or tensions you want readers to sit with after finishing your collection?

SQ: I love this question. I’m going to try and do my best to answer it. It goes to the cultural, religious idea of a “good girl.” While I don’t know if there is an exact, definitive definition of what it means, I’m sure many South Asian women will be very familiar with the idea of being told to be a “good girl.” That generally involves being virtuous, to some degree pious, and somewhat compliant.

This idea of being a “good girl” leads to the tension in the gap between who we are versus who we are expected to be. Who we are on the inside, and the desires and needs and wants that we may have, may not fall under the definition of a “good girl.”

Which raises the question: what do you do with that? Do you deny parts of yourself? Do you repress them? Do you try and live with them and accept the consequences? Do you burn your life down and create an entirely different structure? There’s a lot that happens within that space.

And it’s not even the expectations from within your culture, but also the expectations from those outside of it. The ideas and stereotypes that people have simply by looking at you—at your skin colour, your age. Those attributes that you yourself don’t anchor yourself in every day, but when other people see you, they may.

Musical taste is just one example, which I know sounds very random. I absolutely love music. I grew up with older siblings, and music was a huge part of our lives. When I went to concerts, I was often one of the very few people of colour in those spaces. If you listened to Mudhoney and Alice in Chains in the ’90s, chances were you’d likely be white.

And it raises the question: because there are these expectations of who you are, what are you allowed to participate in based on those expectations? What are you allowed to participate in freely and comfortably and not be looked at as though you are an outsider or someone who does not belong?

If you decide to forgo these expectations, it raises the question: at what cost? Financial, relational, emotional, physical. What are you going to lose? And what are you going to gain as you weave your way through the expectations and the tensions that coincide with them?

I’ve heard in conversations among many South Asian women within this age group that so much of their lives have been spent performing, trying to live up to certain ideas and ideals, only to realize by the time they hit their forties that not only is it not doable, they don’t even want to do it. It’s harmful to them on the inside.

SH: Despite the sadness and isolation present in many of the stories, there are moments of resistance, self-discovery, or connection. What do you hope readers ultimately take away from these women’s journeys?

SQ: I don’t know if there’s one specific message, but perhaps an opening to having an understanding or a conversation about normalizing having struggles and challenges. It is normal to be sad and happy simultaneously. It’s normal to love your family and also feel like you want to make the great escape. These things can all kind of coincide.

I think there’s a lot of guilt and shame in that we have these inner thoughts, and we feel like we’ll be judged, or if we say them aloud, people will not receive them with the nuance and the subtlety with which they are arrived at. Struggling as a mother, finding motherhood hard, does not mean you don’t love your children.

In terms of the isolation and resistance, perhaps the idea is that it is okay to not be okay. So many of us, in various ways, at various times, have not been okay. But we live in a world where we feel compelled to perform, and perform wellness in particular. Some people cover up any felt or perceived weaknesses or defects, but that is really hard to do over a sustained period of time.

There is a big toll to performing that we are okay and that our feelings don’t matter.

Through these stories, I wanted to illuminate that all of these emotions, all of these experiences, are valuable. Our age group and the intersectionality of our identities lend themselves to wonderful stories that are rich and layered with contradictions, needs, wants, and disappointments. We can get what we want and feel confused about it, and we cannot get what we want and drive ourselves mad over it.

In a sense, I just wanted to out the inner world.

SH: Your stories portray women whose desires, frustrations, and inner lives are often overlooked. Do you see your collection as a feminist intervention? And if so, what conversations are you hoping to open up?

SQ: To say that I consciously set about writing a feminist collection feels far too ambitious for my first book, but it’s a great question.

In mainstream narratives, women of my age, my race, and my gender are rarely portrayed or not portrayed at all, or are portrayed in ways that are not in line with who we actually are and how we live our lives. They’re built on stereotypes, misrepresentations, and socially and historically constructed ideas of what it means to be Muslim, female, brown, immigrant.

I want to normalize brown Muslim women. I want to show that we have agency while, at the same time, we are trying to respect and honour the cultural framework from which we came.

We’re not simplistic creatures who absorb or digest whatever we’re told and acquiesce to whatever we’re told to do. These are not the women I know. These women are thoughtful. They are brilliant, analytical, and successful. They are also messy. They are single mothers. They are unwed. They run the gamut. They are sexual.

It’s just that idea that if we keep talking about our stories, if we keep on showing different patches from the same quilt we come from, it normalizes us as a group. It allows us to just be, to exist in different and contradictory ways, and more importantly, to exist in ways that are defined by us and not defined externally.

SH: Your characters often experience depression in ways that are subtle, private, and difficult to articulate. How do you approach writing mental health struggles without reducing characters to their suffering?

SQ: Thank you. That’s a wonderful compliment, and I really appreciate it.

I think I try and portray it as I either know it or understand it or see it. We can experience a gamut of emotions, including ones that are directly oppositional to each other, at the same time, at the same juncture in life.

These women are existing with darker, perhaps more depressive thoughts. But they’re doing it while they’re living their outward lives, whatever those may be. And they’re trying to reconcile both of them. It’s always an active conversation in their heads as to how much they want to reveal to the outside world or the ways in which they try and conceal anything that may indicate they are not well.

A lot of these emotions are brought about or triggered by everyday conversations, everyday experiences, everyday meetings.

You live your life. You do what you need to do. But perhaps there’s an internal narrator pointing out the things that don’t feel good while you’re talking to your boss at work or ordering from a menu at a high-end restaurant. These things are often the most mundane, our most everyday regular events and occurrences.

SH: What is next for you? What are you working on?

SQ: My next project is very much a work in progress and I am at the part where it feels fresh, the part where I feel I can let myself play a bit more.

I can say that, at least for Brown Girls, Grown Up, the writing of the first draft, where I was holed up in my basement listening to my favorite music was the most amazing, magical part of the whole process. The part that I want to recreate again and again.

And then sharing that work with others and seeing, experiencing, and hearing their reactions and thoughts. I don’t know what the word would be. Gift? Blessing? Thrill?
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This experience has been truly amazing. I’m grateful to be here, and I hope I get to have more conversations like this down the road.

​Sima Qadeer is a Toronto-based author whose writing explores themes of identity, belonging, and empowerment. She previously worked in public policy and administration, focusing on gender equality with the Canadian International Development Agency and Global Affairs Canada.

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​Salma Hussain writes poetry and prose, and her writing has appeared in various literary magazines. Her debut chapbook of poetry, What If Maybe & Other Poems, was published by Baseline Press last summer. Her upcoming young adult novel, It's Not Over Yet, will be published by Penguin Random House Canada later this year. She lives in Toronto.