STAGES OF FARIDAH

In her brilliantly unreserved memoir, Malaysia’s theatre matriarch braids childhood, heartbreak and hard-won triumphs into one candid performance on the page.

- Words: ANANDHI GOPINATH

In Me, Mamak, Datuk Faridah Merican does what she has spent a lifetime teaching others to do on stage: she tells the truth without flinching.

The memoir is not a polished literary performance. It is something rarer—a voice caught in the act of remembering. Long before she and her husband, Joe Hasham OAM, founded The Actors Studio in 1989 and gave Malaysia's performing arts scene a permanent home, Faridah was already woven into the fabric of the country’s cultural life. She has long been our atmospheric anchor: the woman in the front row and the backstage corridor, an icon of such warmth and presence that you might assume her memoir would be similarly generous—easy, celebratory, safe. It is not. Me, Mamak is frank where it could be flattering, and candid where it could be kind. That is its great virtue, and occasionally its structural challenge.

AN UN-EDITABLE VOICE

Faridah will be the first to tell you she is not a professional author, and Me, Mamak makes no attempt to masquerade as a meticulously architected literary memoir. Instead, it embraces the raw, oral quality of a story told out loud, with all the digressions and sudden emotional shifts that come with a life fully lived. It is a quick, breathless read—a book I finished in a single sitting—propelled by personality, not plot.

What makes the text leap off the page is its stubbornly human rhythm. If you have ever spent time in Faridah’s presence, you will recognise her cadence within three sentences: loud, generous, occasionally chaotic, always honest. “I was simply telling my story to Joe, and Joe dropped it down for the book. It was very easy for me to be truthful and honest because these are my own experiences and memories. I just told the story as it happened,” she says.