---
title: 📖 Started reading "Fundamentally" by Nussaibah Younis
date: 2026-03-15T17:27:13.661Z
slug: 2026-03-15-started-reading-fundamentally
author: Thomas Wilson-Cook
tags: 
  - journal
  - reading

---
I picked up the 2025 Women's Prize shortlister "Fundamentally" by Nussaibah Younis.  This was a Christmas gift from a family member, after I remember putting it down on my list because it ended up on a few end of year lists.

I remember being intrigued by the author.  That she'd written this piece of fiction based heavily on her own experience in the humanitarian sector, working on deradicalisation at the UN.  

At their worst, books like this can turn into strange power fantasies, or self-mythologies that strip away a lot of the nuance.  It's how we can end up with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ([wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manic_Pixie_Dream_Girl)) or Mary Sue ([wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue))[^1].

I like Younis' interview in the Womens Prize ([link](https://womensprize.com/in-conversation-with-nussaibah-younis/)) because it seems like she might have gone the reverse direction, where the novel came after (or was part of) deconstructing that self-aggrandising narrative:

> I studied Arabic, read a lot of books, got a PhD. Then I went to Iraq. The trouble is, having an Iraqi father did not make me Iraqi, and having a PhD did not make me competent. I was just another idiot foreigner; well-meaning but totally out of my depth. I spent ten years as an NGO worker, trying to ‘save Iraq.’ I lived an insane life, pursuing hair-brained schemes to ‘build peace.’ My naivety shone like a spotlight as I played out my brown saviour fantasies, all the while being mocked and extorted by locals. Before long, I was embroiled in the farcical humanitarian sector. I’d started out by asking: how can I help? But soon I was asking: how can I maximise my budgets? How can I curry favour with corrupt Iraqi ministers? And how can I screw over my rivals? As a workplace, humanitarianism is as aggressive as investment banking, except that lives hang in the balance

Like I said, I'm only really about an hour in but as I hurtle towards page 100 (the point at which I give myself complete freedom to did-not-finish a book), I can easily foresee making my way through this one.

[^1]: While one can gender the Mary Sue to a "Gary Stu" or "Marty Stu" , it's interesting that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype relies a bit more on gender dynamics.  I certainly don't think we see any Manic Pixie Dream Boys, and personally I wouldn't care to.
