How to Dodge Flying Sandals: Daniel Nour on queer identity, comedy and Nigella Lawson's praise for his debut memoir

It's not often that an emerging author receives a glowing review of their debut book from Nigella Lawson, but that's exactly what happened to Daniel Nour.

It all came about after the pair had bumped into each other, almost by happenstance, in the green room during the Sydney Writers' Festival in May 2025. Shortly after, the Domestic Goddess publicly endorsed Daniel Nour's memoir, How to Dodge Flying Sandals and Other Life Advice, describing him as a "fine writer with a serious gift for comedy".

"The thrill of it for me is not just that she read it, but that this icon for gays, this vixen with this great precision of language and elegance, was a figure of nourishment and a symbolic kind of consolation for me as a young queer boy growing up in a fat body," Daniel tells The New Arab.

"She had this great confidence about food and this great certainty about taking pleasure and allowing oneself to enjoy the moose, to enjoy the lasagne, to enjoy the roast chicken, which I witnessed through my teens and twenties, especially whenever I felt overwhelmed or perhaps when I was feeling down on myself. And to think that that same person was now connecting with my work was a real full-circle moment for me."

First published in May 2025 via Affirm Press, How to Dodge Flying Sandals is a "failing to come of age" memoir based on Daniel's life as a queer Coptic Egyptian living in Sydney, Australia.

Divided into non-linear 'How To' chapters, Daniel subverts the self-help genre to explore family expectations, religion, culture, community, sexuality, and travels to Egypt. And yes, Nigella Lawson features in one of his many anecdotes.

"It's my earnest attempt to be a good son who subsequently, in his eagerness to date girls to appease his parents, has all of these humiliations and goes on a Christian TV show and says marriage is between a man and a woman, and then the next day is on a couch with a man, fondling his leg," he reflects.

"I actually hate and am entertained by this culture of 'how to', like The Diary of a CEO, the how-to-be-a-millionaire-by-30 podcasts. The proliferation, the explosion of the self-help genre, speaks to the outsourcing of our primal instincts and our own intuitive knowledge to other people, which is a great shame. I don't like this idea that there is one way to do it, and that's why I've chosen to organise my book into a series of 'how to' chapters, which are an ironic mockery of that genre," Daniel tells The New Arab. 

"How to Marry is, in effect, how to divorce. How to Die is an account of the catastrophic funeral that was given for my grandfather. How to be Born is a cousin's equally chaotic christening and circumcision, and so forth."

Laughing so much you soil yourself

Daniel first started working on his book in 2021, shortly after he was selected for Affirm Press Mentorship through Sweatshop, a movement of young Indigenous and migrant-background writers based in Sydney's western suburbs.

While the process of writing his memoir was "sometimes wonderfully smooth and free", he admitted it was also challenging.

"The stories about my parents' fights, or the death of my grandfather and the way the funeral was such a catastrophe, or my nosy family, or invasive priests and the humiliations that I publicly suffered in my participation with a Christian reality TV show in 2020, all of that was very unsettling," he shares. 

"There were sleepless nights and stress and countless therapy sessions too, just thinking about what I am obliged to say, and what will be the ramifications of that, especially the challenge of how my immediate family will respond. That was a source of ongoing stress, and in some ways still is," Daniel adds. 

"This strange thing we have in our culture, especially in the diaspora, which is that, even though some members of our community are not particularly artistic or inclined to read, they still feel that any public-facing work about our community and certainly about themselves, is scandalous, is a way of being publicly defamed. They don't necessarily have that understanding of literature, so they conflate any kind of writing as a mockery.

"That has been the ongoing challenge for me: To say, well, actually, this is not a historical account. This is literature. This is autofiction. So, to learn about boundaries in a very short period of time, and to have what is really kind of a literary enterprise turn into a self-improvement exercise and self-discovery about my relationship with the community and my relationship with the family has been a steep and rapid, uphill learning curve."

Despite this, Daniel believes comedy and the ability to laugh at ourselves are important elements in storytelling.

"I never wanted to write some browbeating, chest-thumping, mournful story of my oppressed life, because I'm not oppressed. I'm deeply loved, I have my community and my family," he says.

"Queer and migrant narratives often focus on pain, but my memoir also celebrates love and laughter and resilience and community, and I want you to laugh while reading it. I want people to laugh so much that they soil themselves a bit. That's my aim."

'It's okay to be ridiculous​​​​​​​' 

Since his book was released, Daniel has become somewhat hyper-aware of how his is perhaps the first in Australian literature, and one of the first in the English language, that has queer Coptic representation.

While he acknowledges this, he stresses that his story shouldn't be viewed as the sole representation of the queer Coptic community. He also trusts readers would know it's much more than that.

"I hope that people, even if they are a bit prejudiced, will enjoy the comedy of the storytelling before they judge the sexuality of the character, which is just one part of my humanity," he tells The New Arab.

"I'm not just a gay person. I'm also a son and a brother and a guy in this culture where we're all expected to be successful and to have it together, and this is a failing to come of age story, a series of humiliations.

"I hope that people will relate to that. I also hope that, as a universal story for the children of migrants, this idea of being a model millennial migrant shows how that falls short for so many of us. I hope I've told that story in an authentic way."

At the time of the interview, Daniel said How to Dodge Flying Sandals hasn't yet had much engagement from readers living in Egypt, especially the queer community there, who have endured decades of ongoing state-sanctioned discrimination and persecution. He said this could be because his book hasn't been translated into Arabic yet, but he hopes his story will travel regardless.

"In my community, queerness isn't just a taboo; it's almost a ghost story, and this creates a void and a sense of being unseen," says Daniel. 

"Young queer people from culturally diverse backgrounds often feel isolated. By sharing my messy, awkward, and occasionally humiliating story, I hope to offer them a sign that you're not alone and that it's okay to be ridiculous in our attempts to fulfil some norm or some ideal. We all go through it."

How to Dodge Flying Sandals and Other Life Advice by Daniel Nour is out now via Affirm Press/Simon & Schuster.

Elias Jahshan is the social media editor at The New Arab. He is also the editor of the anthologies This Arab Is Queer and This Queer Arab Family, both via Saqi Books