A Story of Friendship: A Guest Post by Marjan Kamali
Evocative prose delivers this gripping story of an unlikely friendship, courage and hope for a better future. Capturing Iran on the verge of revolution, this is a cautionary tale centering around women’s rights during a tumultuous time. Read on for an exclusive essay from Marjan Kamali on writing The Lion Women of Tehran.
Paperback
$14.24
$18.99
The Lion Women of Tehran
The Lion Women of Tehran
In Stock Online
Paperback
$14.24
$18.99
An “evocative read and a powerful portrait of friendship, feminism, and political activism” (People) set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran—from nationally bestselling author Marjan Kamali.
An “evocative read and a powerful portrait of friendship, feminism, and political activism” (People) set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran—from nationally bestselling author Marjan Kamali.
After my second novel, The Stationery Shop, came out, I started writing the next one and I was about 100 pages in when the pandemic began. As I scrolled Instagram, I saw posts from a woman in Iran who was my friend – not just on social media – but once upon a time in real life. We had been best friends in elementary school in Tehran: we played almost every day, did our homework together, and shared our dreams of who we’d grow up to be.
But we also shared fears that come with living during a war and being young girls in an increasingly autocratic state. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, I spent many nights in the basement as bombs fell outside. Every time I made it back upstairs, I was deeply aware of the chance I had been given to live. And when my family left Tehran – in a rush, with the kettle still on the stove, without saying goodbye to my best friend, – I had that same feeling of being the one who got away. At age ten, I arrived in New York City with my best friend still in Iran. I knew I had to live doubly hard for both of us.
In lockdown, as I looked at my friend’s posts, I wondered again about the different directions our lives had taken. Here I was, an author writing stories in America, and there she was working at a human rights organization in Iran. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the friends we make when we are young truly shape us. Their influence on our lives lasts even if the friendship doesn’t. And friendship breakups are just as heart-wrenching as romantic ones.
I knew I had to write the story of a broken friendship. So I took a deep breath, put away the hundred pages of the other novel, and started writing THE LION WOMEN OF TEHRAN. In this book, two girls named Ellie and Homa share the joys of childhood, the ups and downs of adolescence, and go off to university together. But their friendship is ruptured when one of them betrays the other. Decades later they reconnect in America. All along, one of them, Homa, fights tirelessly for Iranian women to be free. I made the two main characters born the year my mother was born so I could show how women gained so many rights in Iran over decades only to then have those rights taken away.
The power of fiction is that it helps us see not just what happened in history, but — as E.L. Doctorow said — how those events made people feel. By creating the characters of Ellie and Homa, I hope to show the vibrancy and courage and complexity of two girls from Iran who I made up but who are very real to me.
Since this book has been published, I have heard from readers who’ve shared stories of their own childhood friends, of people in their lives with whom they are no longer in touch but who continue to influence them, of friendships resurrected and reborn, of friends that sustain them and friends they miss dearly. It has been an absolute joy to share this story of friendship with you.