Drawing on interviews and in-depth research, Sanam Maher pieces together Qandeel Baloch's life from the village where she grew up in the backwaters of rural Pakistan, to her stint in a women's shelter after escaping her marriage, to her incarnation as a social media sensation, to her eventual murder at the hands of her brother.
... unfolds like a thriller, only it’s true ...Maher’s investigation of Baloch’s life and death is remarkable: It is not just the story of one rebellious woman but a study of an entire country and culture in collision with the new demands of the Internet, reality TV and women determined to shake off old strictures. Maher, a journalist based in Karachi, is a patient and transparent narrator, telling us where accounts conflict, which interviewees are unreliable and what questions must go unanswered. Her style of writing — stark and sometimes poetic — befits her subject ... commendable when so many journalists got Baloch’s story wrong ... Maher does not glorify her subject ... a refreshingly complicated portrait ... Maher’s book is both intimate and sweeping: It gives readers a deep sense of who Baloch was, about the world that created her and why so many people couldn’t stop watching. Admirably, Maher gives us no easy answers. But one takeaway is clear: In a place where worlds are colliding, and honor is on the line, it is often women who pay the price.
In A Woman Like Her, an exemplary work of investigative journalism, Sanam Maher delves into the story of a woman as misunderstood in death as in life. Maher conducted hundreds of interviews — with Baloch’s family, the media, mullahs, feminist activists, experts in cybercrime — to indict the society that enabled and applauded Baloch’s murder. Waseem Azeem and his associates killed Qandeel Baloch, Maher argues, but they did not act alone ... Baloch cannot speak for herself, and Maher allows her to remain elusive, a figure who fashioned her public face out of truth, yearning and exaggeration, and who possessed a dogged insistence on living her life on her own terms. Her book attempts to tell a broader story exploring the fractures opened in Pakistan by social media, which offers and even encourages a kind of freedom and daring of self-presentation that exist in deep conflict with a conservative society.
... unfolds like a thriller, only it’s true ... Maher, a journalist based in Karachi, is a patient and transparent narrator, telling us where accounts conflict, which interviewees are unreliable and what questions must go unanswered. Her style of writing—stark and sometimes poetic—befits her subject ... Maher’s book is both intimate and sweeping: It gives readers a deep sense of who Baloch was, about the world that created her, and why so many people couldn’t stop watching. Maher gives us no easy answers. But one takeaway is clear: In a place where worlds are colliding, and honor is on the line, it is often women who pay the price.
