Malala Yousafzai

This is Fresh Air. I am Terry Gross. As remarkable as it is that my guest Malala Yusufzai won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was seventeen, there are remarkable ways she's been living her life since then. Let's start with the famous part of her story. She was born in 1997 and grew up in a remote region of Pakistan's Swat Valley near the Afghanistan border.

In 2008, after the Taliban invaded her town, terrorizing the people, they banned girls' education. She publicly spoke out for her right and the right of all girls to go to school. As payback in 2012, when she was fifteen, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman. She was flown to a hospital in England where she continues to live. Her recovery was miraculous.

It's when I read her recent memoir, Finding My Way, that I learned how the bullet changed the course of her life, thrusting her into a new culture, and changing her in ways that didn't quite fit her public image as an inspirational hero and top student, and sometimes even challenged her own self image. When she was admitted to Oxford University, a dream come true. She wanted to live the life of a teenager and find time to make friends, have fun, have adventures, including jumping from her dorm roof to the campus bell tower. She defied some of her culture's traditions and her parents' expectations, from how she dressed, to who she married.

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