44 _
PRESENT
‘MY VIEW OF THE WORLD WAS CHANGING, MY VIEW OF WHO I AM
WAS CHANGING. BY THIS POINT, I WAS 32 AND I WANTED TO BE A
SERIOUS WRITER. I DIDN’T WANT TO PLAY SECOND FIDDLE’After Italy, we arrived in Oklahoma, in the
US, and were eventually offered citizenship.
We had left Baba behind in Isfahan. I began
to understand, bit by bit, that I would never
live with my father again. As a Muslim,
wealthy Iranian dentist, he and our other
family members were safe in a way my
mother, branded an apostate, wasn’t. He
was too attached to his life to follow us,
and he remarried and had a new family.
As a teenager growing up in
Oklahoma, because I was an
immigrant kid having lost my social
status and my father, I was all about
security. I wanted to be able to support
myself and never have to be dependent on
a man. I thought: Okay, that means I have
to go to law school or business school or I
have to become a doctor.
I focused on doing what everyone else
thought was best. In the US, it seemed like
there was such a clear set of things that
you could do to get from one step to the
next, to succeed. I had seen universities
like Harvard and Princeton in the movies,
and I got into Princeton. I have very few
regrets in my life, but one of them is
studying economics instead of literature
at Princeton. Later, at Harvard Business
School, there were so many things my
business classmates took for granted; there
were so many things that were patriarchal
and racist. The was an assumption that you
were going to just give yourself up to
banking and making a ton of money. I was
always the dissenting voice in class.
My husband and I met at Princeton.
Much of our 20s were spent in New York,
and were all about getting the right job, theright apartment. Everyone at Princeton
was trying to work for a company called
McKinsey, so I made that my goal. At
McKinsey, all the best people there had
gone on to study again at Harvard Business
School, so I followed them. We then moved
to France, so my husband could go to
graduate school. We lived in Paris, and then
we bought a canal house in Amsterdam,
the Netherlands, because my husband’s
career was there. I had given that hungry
immigrant girl everything she wanted.
From the age of about 28, I started
writing feverishly; I was also reading about
50 books a year. I called bookstores in Iran
and bought picture books from particular
regions. The seeds of my first novel were
kind of being scattered. I was learning a lot
about writing, but I didn’t know how to
make sense of it all, and I had nothing to
show for it. I didn’t know how to articulate
the things I was learning and apply them to
my work. I wrote a lot of garbage. Living in
Amsterdam, I became obsessed with the
story of Kambiz Roustayi, an Iranian
asylum-seeker who died after he set
himself on fire on Dam Square.
I was an over-achieving person,
with an over-achieving husband, but
it literally looked like I just spent my
days hanging around in cafés. I was
getting frustrated. My view of the world
was changing, my view of who I am was
changing. By this point, I was 32 and I
wanted to be a serious writer. I didn’t want
to play second fiddle and I didn’t want to be
in this very traditional marriage. I had also
fallen out of love with my husband. He was
my best friend, and he was somebody Icould have been friends with for the rest of
my life—but I shouldn’t have married him.
The things we wanted were very different.
I didn’t have the capacity to picture our
future. I felt like I had failed in a big, big way.
It was at this point that I applied to Iowa
Writer’s Workshop, a creative writing program
in the US. It was a total pipe dream, and
I didn’t think I would get in. But when
I did, my husband and I both agreed
that I should go. I think that’s also
where our marriage ended. >