Our Untold Truths
In early March 2020, I had just submitted my MA thesis for review, pending revisions and a final presentation. I was also due to fly to Marseille for an exhibition built around an article I'd written on student life in North Cyprus. Three days before my flight, it was cancelled. COVID had arrived, and the world was closing its doors.
We retreated to our student apartments, which looked like a scene out of an end-of-the-world film.
To stay active and creative, I threw myself into trying new recipes — and then, one night, an idea arrived: what if I put my research and interviewing skills to use? I'd just received questionnaire responses from over 50 people for my thesis, and something about those responses gave me hope. So I wrote a new set of questions, drafted a simple agreement on how the responses could be used, and started sharing it with friends and family, asking them to pass it on.
When the responses started to trickle in, I wasn't entirely sure what to do with them or even where to begin.
It took another three years—a move to a new country, becoming a wife and a mother—before the book finally came together. By then, I had over 30 responses. I held the baby in one hand late into the wee hours while typing with the other. In the end, stories from twenty-seven women across three continents and fourteen countries made it into the final book.
Our Untold Truths holds raw, unfiltered accounts of the search to become a parent, motherhood, women's health, childhood trauma, healing, career, and simply the ongoing, in-between work of growing and becoming. It isn't polished or curated for comfort. The book features honest conversations with incredible women willing to be vulnerable and share their untold truths; for most, it was the first time they'd told anyone.
Writing this book changed the direction of my own life. It's what led me to start hosting storytelling and journaling workshops, to run book clubs, to begin Letters from the In-Between, and it's the reason this website exists in the form it does today.This book is for women. It's for anyone who has ever loved a woman, raised one, or simply stood close enough to witness what she carries.
Our Untold Truths is available on Amazon and at Nuria Bookshop in Kenya.
