All My Rage
All My Rage
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Sabaa Tahir on All My Rage
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A motel she never got to say goodbye toThe book’s origin is a specific, unresolved loss. When Tahir was in college, her father had a stroke and the family sold the motel in the Mojave Desert where she had grown up before she could return. The grief had nowhere to go, so it went onto the page.
It was very weird for me because I didn’t get a chance to go say goodbye to it or have any closure. And it was such a formative part of my childhood experience that I started thinking about it all the time and then I started writing about it. [paraphrased from audio]
For years the manuscript existed outside any publishing contract, which meant it also existed outside the pressure of an audience. The pages accumulated whenever the emotional need was strong enough, not when a deadline demanded them.
I began to work on the draft every time I was angry — at the world, myself, fate. I didn’t know that the book was a book, really. It was just a repository for my frustration for a long time. A conversation with myself.
A death in 2017 forced a structural reckoning. What had been background texture in the manuscript became the book’s center, and Tahir spent the next nine months rewriting large sections to put addiction and its surrounding shame front and forward.
In 2017, someone in my life overdosed and passed away. I’d had friends and family battle addiction before. But this person was very young. It was terrible. I could not stop thinking about the family — about the shame and silence surrounding the death.
The title arrived from a news event that had nothing to do with fiction. When the phrase “Muslim rage” appeared on a magazine cover, Muslim social media users responded by hashtagging everyday irritations, and Tahir found in that collective joke a serious structural injustice worth naming.
I thought, how sad that an emotion as simple as anger, as basic and essential to humanity as anger, cannot be expressed by specific groups without it being a source of fear. If a woman shouts or cries because she’s angry, it’s ‘oh, she’s out of control.’ If a Black man expresses indignation at being slammed to the ground during an arrest, he’s seen as a threat. If a young person, the people I write for, says ‘hey, that’s wrong,’ they’re seen as naïve to the ways of the world. As a result, so many of us hold so much anger inside. That’s such an unjust way of being and such a terrible way of forcing our humanity into a bottle. I can’t change that, so I thought I’d write about it.
How she wrote it
No magic to fix it this timeTahir had spent years building fantasy worlds where a battle scene or a magic system could release narrative pressure. Stripping those tools away for a contemporary novel set in the Mojave was not a stylistic preference but a daily discipline she had to enforce on herself each time she sat down.
The no magic thing is actually a pretty big deal. We can’t gloss over that. I had to remind myself every time I sat down, I can’t fix these problems with magic and I can’t bring in tension with battle scenes and big fights. I have to focus on the characters in their internal development.
When that uncertainty got loud, she returned to a fixed point: all her books are ultimately about hope. That reminder became a kind of stabilizer through the fifteen years the manuscript was in progress.
Both main characters in the novel carry traumatic histories that are deliberately withheld past the midpoint. The choice was less a structural puzzle than a psychological observation about how people actually carry damage.
A lot of times, those who have experienced trauma don’t always accept it about themselves, and sometimes it’s not a central fact of their life in a day-to-day way. It’s something that can be buried and to dredge it up takes time and conscious thought, or someone has to be forced to face it... I really wanted to drop readers in the middle of it, and to me, dropping a reader in the story meant that they don’t know everything about these characters — because guess what? These characters don’t know everything about themselves.
For the scenes in which her teenage characters make choices an adult reader will immediately recognize as self-destructive, Tahir drew on a specific source: a Guardian interview in which YA author Jason Reynolds spoke with incarcerated men, one of whom said that at the time, his bad decisions felt like his only decisions.
That’s really what I wanted to incorporate here. At the time, the choices these kids make are the only choices they feel they can [make] and that’s not a failure on their part — that’s a failure on the part of the adults around them.
Most of the final editing happened during the COVID pandemic, roughly fifteen years after the first pages. The compressed, chaotic conditions echoed the early years of writing the Ember in the Ashes series, when her children were not yet in school.
I always say that writing is editing, so it was this very essential part of the creation process. It was difficult; I found I had to be much more flexible, harking back to my early days of writing when my kids weren’t in school. The wonderful thing was, I knew I could do it because I had done it before.
The personal thread
Love and hope for the child in the desertThe manuscript that became All My Rage was written in private, without a contract, for roughly fifteen years. By publication it had been completely transformed by grief, but also by something Tahir had rarely put into words before: the act of looking back at her own childhood with compassion rather than judgment.
I’ve never been a person who really thought about things like self-love, but it took a lot of self-love to write this book. It was like looking back at who I was as a child out in the desert who didn’t know how to deal with difficulties that came her way — and expressing love and hope for that person.
When the manuscript finally broke open, it was because Tahir stopped writing toward a reader and started writing toward herself. The permission she gave herself was specific: this book did not have to exist for anyone else.
I told myself that it was OK if no one read this book. Because I wasn’t writing it for them, I was writing it for me. That’s when the words came. That’s when the story finally made sense.
That shift, from audience-facing to self-directed, is also what produced the description she uses for the finished book: not “a book of my heart” but something she “tore” from it, across years and iterations.
On what’s at stake
Anger, immigration, and the bottle we force humanity intoThe novel’s Pakistani immigrant characters, Misbah and her husband, carry the immigration thread that Tahir insists belongs inside any honest account of the American dream. Speaking on the MSNBC Velshi Banned Book Club, she placed that experience in terms that move beyond the book’s plot.
To be hated simply because of who you are, because you’re seeking a better life — when you’re doing nothing wrong, when you’re helping to sustain the foundations of a nation, and you’re met with disdain, that is painful. And whether we like it or not, that is part of the American dream. [paraphrased from audio]
Reviews and readers frequently treat a novel featuring Muslim and Pakistani American characters as a representative document for those communities. Tahir refuses that assignment on behalf of any single book.
All My Rage is one story. It is not meant to represent the Muslim community or the Pakistani community or the desert community. No one book can do that. My overlapping communities — Muslim, Pakistani American, trauma survivors, fantasy book lovers, Star Wars fans — all these communities are filled with millions of different experiences. It’s a song with millions of melodies, and this book is just one melody. Just one.
The novel deliberately refuses to resolve the emotional and social questions it opens. Tahir frames that refusal as a form of respect for young readers, who already live inside ambiguity whether or not the books they are handed acknowledge it.
Showing the messy reality of these kids’ lives, both in the struggle and in the beauty and the humor — and allowing for a lack of resolution or a resolution that’s ambiguous because, the truth is, trauma does not always leave us.
What she wants us to sit with
Feeling less alone on the other sideTahir’s stated hope for All My Rage is precise. It is not that readers finish the book with answers but that specific readers, the ones who recognize themselves in Salahudin and Noor, come away knowing they were seen.
I hope that the people who need to be seen — and they know who they are — feel seen with this book. I just want people to feel less alone.
At the National Book Award ceremony in 2022, where All My Rage won the prize for Young People’s Literature, Tahir turned the acceptance speech toward the readers themselves rather than toward the book or its making. The exchange she described is reciprocal.
My beautiful readers have told me my books make them feel less alone. You make me feel less alone. I have been a misfit and an outcast and lonely and lost, but when I write for you, I am none of those things. And I thank you with all my heart for that gift. [paraphrased from audio]
Adults who read YA often want to guide younger readers toward clear lessons. Tahir pushes back on that impulse, drawing a distinction between resolution and credit.
I don’t know if, as adults, we give young people enough credit for being able to live within a question as opposed to having to have a resolution. I think in general we don’t give them enough credit for being able to handle the things they’re given to read and to form their own opinions.
That trust in the reader is also the book’s argument: the teenagers in All My Rage are not waiting to be explained. They are waiting to be met.