One of our most celebrated episodes this year focused on the life of Malala Yousupzai.

This episode originally aired on October 30th, 2025.

At 28, Malala Yousafzai's life has been anything but ordinary.

When she was just 15, she was shot by the Taliban on her way to school, targeted for advocating

for girls' rights to education.

At 17, she became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, opening schools

and speaking around the world with the Malala Fund.

Now Malala is sharing a different side of herself in her new memoir, Finding My Way.

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt.

I'm USA Today Books Reporter Claire Mulroy.

In Finding My Way, Malala chronicles her college years at Oxford, where she found her identity as a young adult and a global activist.

She writes about dating and partying and playing the game among us during COVID, but she also writes about her hesitation to get married and processing the attack that changed her life over a decade ago.

Finding My Way is on bookshelves now. Thank you for joining us, Malala.

Thank you.

I wanted to start by asking, you know, at the beginning of this book, you write that your whole life people have been telling you who you are. You're

taking this chance now to correct that record, reintroduce yourself. I mean, can you tell us

like what parts, what parts of you have been missing that you're excited to share with the world now?

It has been an extraordinary journey for me to be a normal person. And I got that exposure by going to college.

This was the first time that I was on my own, managing my own schedule myself.

I was away from my parents and my work.

And I allowed myself to try new things, make friends, and I wanted this because I was a very lonely student at this new school in the UK where I was shifted for my treatment and surgeries.

So I wanted friends more than anything at college. I wanted a bit of that adventurous experience that could just let me reconnect with my younger self, which I thought

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