This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, this is Annie.

Anne Smitta.

And welcome to Stuff I Never Told You, a production of IHeart Radio.

And for today's book club, we are talking about Malika Gereeb's 2019 graphic memoir, I Was Their American Dream.

This award-winning illustrated work depicts a biographical memoir of Gareeb, an Egyptian Filipino-American immigrant, as she navigates all the facets

of her identity through school, college, and marriage. The illustrations, which Grieb also did,

are fun, and the layouts shift a lot, which makes it very dynamic. There are things in there

like recipes and crafts, like bingo

cards kind of, cutouts. There's a page she says, like you could rip this one out and make your

own zine. So it's really fun. It's like a very jubilant teenage growing up experience.

I don't know.

It's very fun.

And Grie has said she grew up reading comics and making her own comics and zines, even from a young age.

So I love that.

And she's a big proponent about zines, even from a young age. So I love that. And she's a big proponent about zines, particularly.

She wants you to go out and find some zines. I love that. Yes. And also, this sparked an interesting

conversation around drawing race without making the illustration look like a caricature or a stereotype

and avoiding making whiteness seem like the default.

So the art is, it's almost kind of, I don't know, it feels kind of dreamlike in a way, I don't know.

But that was something she specifically did, was not really

...