I should have been a writer

There are some truly sad anecdotes in Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach. Muneeza Shamsie, for instance, in ‘The Words of Women’, reflects on her mother’s fate in Pakistan, noting that, ‘on the last night of her life, she rang my paternal aunt Tazeen and said, “All these years I was turned into a housewife and made useless! I should have been a writer!” Such a self-revelation’, Shamsie comments, ‘at eighty-six, a few hours before dying!’