Zoya Patel's new novel, Once a Stranger, is about finding truth in diverse families

It was the book she had to write, but that didn't make it any easier.

"It was quite torturous," she says.

"I wrote it because I got to a point with my writing, where the next thing for my career is to write a book and unless I write a book it's just never going to happen."

Patel is no stranger to writing, she's a journalist and commentator, and she was the previous editor-in-chief of independent feminist magazine Lip Magazine, and created and wrote for online journal Feminartsy.

She was the 2015 ACT Young Woman of the Year and in 2018 released her memoir. But she had already written the first draft for a novel.

"I almost felt like I couldn't write anything else until I had written this story because it was just in my mind a lot and I felt it was necessary to get it out," she says.

"But I loathed every moment of writing the book, it was the most uncomfortable experience I've ever had. I forced myself every day to sit down and write after work."

Eight years after writing that first draft, Once a Stranger is now out in the world.

It follows the lives of three Indian-Muslim Australian women, a mother and her two wildly different daughters, as they reunite after being estranged for six years.

The women are brought together by matriarch Khadija's motor neurone disease diagnosis, after youngest daughter Ayat strays from her family.

Patel says the real story is the women's "emotional narrative" throughout the novel.

The book, like much of Patel's life, is set in Canberra, in the familiar suburbs of Amaroo and Lanyon. For her, it will always be home.

"I've always come back, and the reason for that is I love Canberra, I love living here. I love the Canberra identity, I do think there is one," she says.

"I think that just felt right for me. I don't think it even really occurred to me to not set it in Canberra - it wasn't a conscious thing that I did."

Despite the similarities to her own life, Patel insists this book isn't a memoir, but a work of fiction.

"There are obviously elements of it that have been drawn from my life," she says.

"One of the interesting things, I think, when you're a woman writing fiction, and maybe it's worse when you're a woman of colour, is that people assume that it's your real life.

"So I get a lot of people who will be like, 'that must have been so hard for you'. [But] my dad is alive and my mum does not have motor neurone disease and I have two sisters and a brother - it's not my story."

She did go through similar things, though; from an Indian-Muslim background, she moved from Fiji to Australia at age three, to Canberra from a regional town as a child, and her partner is white.

"I did go through similar things in terms of navigating those cultural differences, and also having a partner who's white, and having to deal with [the] disruption that that causes to the family," she says.

Telling her parents "felt catastrophic" at the time; she felt alone and lost.

This is central to why Patel wrote the book - she wants it to reach "people who may not see their stories reflected in the art that they consume".

"When I was going through that stuff, there was nothing that I could rely on in pop culture, social media wasn't as advanced as it is now."

She remembers typing into Yahoo Answers: "telling parents, white boyfriend, Indian parents disappointed".

"The whole point of writing the book was so that other people, who I know are out there, who are going through the same thing, might actually find something that they can resonate with," she says.

"I also don't feel like we have a lot of stories that talk about the Muslim diaspora in Australia and touch on those experiences.

"I feel like a lot of fiction writing is like being a bit of a magpie and cherry-picking shiny things from different people and different experiences and putting them together into a different format that creates the imaginary character," she says.

While she tried to write a book her younger self could have related to, she was also mindful of not falling into lazy cultural tropes.

"Part of what's challenging when you do write about minority stories is that you don't want to reinforce any stereotypes, you don't want to reinforce any of the racist rhetoric about the communities that you're part of," she says.

"But then sometimes those things are based on a nugget of truth. So you have to navigate that and that was always something that I struggled with growing up.

"I think I write about bits and pieces of that in the book as well. I had to write about them as a Indian-Muslim family, because that's the only version I know.

"I just knew that it's too different for me to accurately portray anything but the version of our culture that I've grown up with.

"I wanted to demystify some of the assumptions that people have about Muslim families and Muslim attitudes [to] women and women's freedoms."

The novel flips between the present and past memories of daughters Ayat and Laila and their mother Khadija, who Patel sees as equal main characters.

"I was writing it all as one timeline and something wasn't working. That's when I went back and started putting those sequences in," she says.

Her intention was for the reader to understand the characters' behaviour, especially for a non-Indian and non-Muslim audience who may not be familiar with the cultural and religious norms.

"I realised that for people to get that and to feel invested in these characters, I had to have a stronger sense of where they were coming from," she says.

"And the only real way to do that was to take people back and provide that insight, and I think that depth was only achievable by having those flashback sequences."

For Patel, writing the book was an exercise in pushing back against fears that a wider audience would not care about a story about navigating two different cultures.

"We always write from a place of knowing ... and we write the stories that are important to us and I think, even though it can seem a little bit niche to be writing about those cultural identity clashes and those struggles, what I've learned over time is that thinking of it as being niche, thinking of it as an unusual area to explore, is my internalised racism."

However, she also believes this is changing, and she wants her future work to reflect diversity as normal.

"We've been told that audiences want 'white people stories', because that's what the audiences have been given," she says.

"But what we're actually seeing is more and more diverse voices being published in the media and a really healthy appetite.

"If you're writing about a diverse character, their diversity has to be fundamental to the story ... I feel like it is changing.

"Something I really want to do with my future work is to have diversity just as the status quo, and I think I am seeing that more and more."