Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership. “If they would just sit down with me … I could reason with them and convince them to end their reign of misogyny and violence,” she writes in her new memoir.

Malala kept a notebook by her bed, filled with rhetorical strategies and talking points – the names of journalists who might be able to broker a meeting with the Taliban, the Qur’an verses she could cite to show that girls do have a right to education in Islam, the things she could say to establish her own credentials as a God-fearing Muslim. Of course, that conversation never happened. Much later, after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, it made her wince to recall her naive belief that the Taliban would ever listen to her.

What did happen is that, little by little, Malala grew up. She’s told her story before, most notably in I Am Malala, co-written with Christina Lamb and published in 2013, the year before she won a Nobel peace prize. Finding My Way picks up the story of her life as she navigates young adulthood.

In Birmingham, her secondary school classmates largely ignore her, but Malala studies hard and wins a place at Oxford – a dream come true. She joins the rowing team, signs up for a plethora of clubs, and stays out late dancing with her roommates, all while keeping up with the international speaking engagements that pay her parents’ mortgage. She has little time to do any reading, let alone turn in assignments on time. Her tutors send her increasingly stern letters.

But she does find time to fall in love. Central to the book is the story of Malala’s tender courtship with Asser, a handsome cricket executive from Lahore. When she develops a passing interest in astronomy, he buys her a telescope. When she tells a national magazine she’s sceptical about the institution of marriage, he gets on the phone with her irate parents to back her up and talk them down. Malala takes a long time to conclude she’s ready for marriage, but when she finally takes the plunge, it brings her “profound happiness”.

Good for her. The clarity of Malala’s childhood conviction that girls have an unassailable right to be educated is what thrust her on to the international stage, but it’s also what, for a time, took away her ability to define herself. When she woke up from a coma after she was attacked, her face was half-paralysed, but even more disconcertingly, her real-life identity, as a mischievous classmate and annoying sister, had been overwritten by the narrative of a “mythical heroine, virtuous and dutiful” – “a serious and shy girl, a wallflower forced to speak out when the Taliban took away her books”. It was an impossible sainthood. Meanwhile, an army of online trolls found her every move reprehensibly un-Islamic.

Finding My Way sees Malala wresting back the story of her own life – rejecting the constrictions and contradictions of a sheltered childhood and sudden fame. At Oxford, she gives her security guards the slip to climb the Lady Margaret Hall bell tower. She celebrates Galentines day with her girlfriends. She finds a therapist to address her PTSD. She falls perilously behind on her work, then slowly cultivates more studious habits. She even goes through a phase of constantly ordering TGI Fridays ribs, not realising they’re pork (whoops). It’s all an education.

These days, on her Instagram stories, you can find Malala in a bucket hat, nodding along to Oasis performing Roll With It, Asser grinning by her side. The work of advocating for girls’ education around the world is still part of her life, but so, too, are more quotidian joys: she has a quirky pen collection she’s proud of, she boasts a mean golf swing, and she’s trying to learn how to swim. It turns out that being a student of life can be a worthy vocation, too.