Author shares experiences growing up mixed race in the UK

Image by MyLondon

Laila Woozeer, author of the book ‘Not Quite White’ which releases on 23 June, takes the readers through an elaborate journey of her experiences growing up as a South Asian in the UK.

The 31-year-old, who moved to North London in the 1990s at the age of four, elaborates on difficulties they faced while growing up, which involved having an identity crisis due to having an American-European mother and an Indian father, being bullied at school for looking different than the other kids and being fetishised when it came to dating.

Woozeer went for therapy before they wrote the book after going through many bad experiences in their lifetime. They said, “I went to therapy in my 20s and you sort of go through everything. That was the real process, bullying had an impact on me through my teenage years, even at 18 and 19 I used to think I’m 1000 per cent ugly and I had accepted the damage rather than undoing it. Then I realised that wasn’t healthy. So everything in the book I write about I feel like I had already processed before writing. If I processed while writing it wouldn’t have been very good and it would have been difficult.”

The author admits that a lot of changes have taken place since they arrived in the 1990s, with social media being an essential tool for people to share their stories and get support.