Rabia Chaudry & Rafael Agustin: A Conversation

Rafael Agustin was a writer on the award-winning CW show Jane the Virgin. He is a Sundance fellow for his TV family comedy Illegal, based on his life as a formerly undocumented American. Agustin co-created and co-starred in the national touring and award-winning autobiographical comedy N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, which received acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Denver Post, and won awards for its advancement of social justice in the arts. In Illegally Yours: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), Agustin writes about having his world turned upside down when he tried to get his driver’s license during his junior year of high school. His Ecuadorian parents were then forced to reveal his immigration status. The family bonded together to navigate Rafa’s school life, his parents’ work lives (doctors in their home country, they were reduced to working menial jobs in the U.S.) – and their shared secret life as undocumented Americans. An alternatingly hilarious and touching exploration of belonging and identity, Illegally Yours asks a simple question: What does it mean to be American?

Rabia Chaudry is a Pakistani American attorney, advocate, podcaster, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Adnan’s Story; the book was the basis of the four-part HBO documentary The Case Against Adnan Syed, for which she served as an executive producer. Chaudry is also co-producer and co-host of three podcasts: Undisclosed (360 million downloads), The 45th (four million downloads), and The Hidden Djinn. “My entire life, I have been less fat and more fat, but never not fat,” notes Chaudry. In Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family (Algonquin Books), she writes about her childhood diet of two full bottles of half-and-half per day, frozen butter sticks to gnaw on, and lots and lots of American processed foods – and that was before her parents discovered Burger King and Dairy Queen. In time she would come to love the Pakistani foods of her heritage, and learn to cook and eat them – in moderation. This memoir with recipes is a love letter to fresh roti, chaat, chicken biryani, ghee, pakoras, and an often hilarious dissection of life in a Muslim immigrant family. It is also a searingly honest portrait of a woman grappling with a body that gets the job done, but refuses to meet the expectations of others.