Samina Ali

1 month ago | datebook.sfchronicle.com | Samina Ali |Kevin Canfield

If you ask Samina Ali about the work that went into her new memoir, she might liken herself to a peckish ocean predator. “You know how they say a shark circles its prey? That’s what it was like,” she told the Chronicle. Ali, a San Francisco writer, nearly died giving birth to her son Ishmael in September 1999. She tried to write about the mental and physical toll in a novel but wasn’t satisfied with the results. Switching to nonfiction, she wrote several drafts, each stronger than the last.