Why did so many of us grow up believing we were too loud, too hairy, too much?In this episode, journalist, author, and personal essayist Iman Hariri-Kia joins Alice to unpack how early media shaped our shame—and how she’s spent her adult life writing herself out of it. From reading Cosmo and Seventeen at an age when she barely understood her own body, to publishing her debut novel and watching it become eerily prophetic, Iman shares what it means to unlearn cultural conditioning, take up space on your own terms, and write the stories you never saw growing up.They talk about beauty, desirability, being “passable,” and the exhausting performance of palatability. Iman opens up about how her work in personal essays helped her process identity shame—and how it also left her overexposed and burned out.This episode is for anyone who’s ever felt unseen, unchosen, or forced to shrink themselves just to belong.Links & Resources:📚 Read Iman’s debut novel, A Hundred Other Girls: https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Other-Girls-Novel/dp/1728247950/📚 Read Iman's sophomore novel, The Most Famous Girl in the World: https://www.amazon.com/Most-Famous-Girl-World-Novel/dp/1728270618/📝 Follow Iman on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/imanharirikia/📰 More of Iman’s writing:https://www.imanharirikia.com/Chapters:00:00 The Shame We Inherited From Teen Magazines06:40 When Representation Still Centers Whiteness10:15 Trying to Be Passable—and The Cost of It13:33 Writing as a Way to Reclaim Power17:55 Personal Essays, Parasocial Fatigue, and Overexposure23:44 From Cultural Shame to Public Voice27:52 The Scam Economy and Who We Forgive31:20 On Writing a Novel That Became Uncomfortably Real35:05 Rejection, Resilience, and Starting Over in Publishing

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