Omer Aziz was born to working-class Pakistani-Canadian parents in Toronto and was educated through scholarships at Queen's University, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the University of Cambridge, and Yale Law School. He worked for Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, and has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic. This memoir deals with the tensions inherent in the pursuit of belonging in a Western world, the price of upward mobility, the quest for knowledge, and the politics of being Brown and coming of age at a time of change and upheaval.