Tasneem Jamal

“This is what Miriam does to me. Always. She demands my attention. But I don’t understand. There is so much I don’t understand. I am speaking now of things beyond gravitational forces and cosmology. And here we have arrived at my motivation for telling you about Miriam and about everything that happened, from the beginning. You see, if I try to make you understand, perhaps I will understand—not only Miriam’s choices, but also mine.”

It has been two years since her lifelong friend, the charismatic astrophysicist Miriam, has killed her young daughter and herself. The narrator—who remains unnamed throughout the novel—is ready to tell Miriam’s story and, thereby, unwittingly reveals her own.

I Never Said That I Was Brave is about two friends, both childhood immigrants to Canada: clever, intellectually ambitious girls who are able to outwardly assimilate. But in adulthood,  fissures—formed by the expectations of their South Asian communities and their family histories—appear and grow deeper and wider as the women navigate a culture vastly different from their parents’.

Recounting the shifting dynamics of her friendship with Miriam, the narrator describes herself, variously, as a “shadow” to Miriam, as “empty space” to Miriam’s sun, as the one in the audience watching Miriam on the stage. But is she the passive observer she purports to be?

Concepts of quantum physics, particularly dark matter and the role of consciousness, serve as underlying metaphors in the book, signaling that the landscape of this novel is unstable, and that the narrator’s version of events should not always be trusted. As she follows her memories on their unpredictable and unreliable paths, we are taken along on a devastating journey, one which blurs distinctions between right and wrong, victim and manipulator, life and death.