Uncover New Truths: A Guest Post by Sanam Mahloudji
Intricate, captivating and complex, this is a multigenerational family saga centered on the unforgettable women of the Valiat family from a Pushcart Prize-winning author. Read on for an exclusive essay from Sanam Mahloudji on writing The Persians.
Hardcover
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The Persians: A Novel
The Persians: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$25.99
$28.99
A darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions personal and political.
A darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions personal and political.
I wrote a short story called “Auntie Shirin” which McSweeney’s published in 2018. It was about an Iranian woman named Shirin who is arrested while on vacation in Aspen for attempted prostitution– she flirts with an undercover cop at a nightclub. Her niece, Bita, a law student in New York, bails her out of jail with money inherited from her mom Seema who died (Seema is Shirin’s sister). Bita is the reluctant voice of reason and the point of view character in the story, but she has problems of her own, adrift and melancholic and not wanting to babysit her aunt but feeling a filial duty. She’s drawn to her Iranian family as much as she’s repelled by them.
But back to Shirin, I wondered what could crack open this proud, over-the-top, arrogant woman. Any greatness her family had in Iran has all but evaporated when they moved to the United States. She shares characteristics with some Iranians I know—men and women. Pride can be a defense mechanism, a shield. I wanted to get inside that pride; bring her down to earth.
I’ve found writing fiction is a lot about trying out things you don’t think will work because they’re too ridiculous. I start by playing. But when I let go of rigidity and let myself experiment, I can uncover new truths.
After the story was published, I couldn’t stop thinking about these characters. Shirin and Bita, but also Seema, and two characters who still lived in Iran—Elizabeth (Shirin and Seema’s mother) and Niaz (Shirin’s daughter that she left behind). I wanted to know everything about these women across three generations of a family. Who they were, why they acted the way they did, what they wanted from life and each other.
I started to write chapters from the points of view of the different women and decided that after the Aspen trip, Shirin would fly to New York and crash at Bita’s apartment with some half-baked plan to restore the family name. I tricked myself into writing a novel– at first it felt like writing individual short stories. Story writing aligned me to to words and sentences, characters and dialogue. What was new was discovering how the threads might cross, and what the overall arc would be.
Soon I was writing about something much bigger than I’d anticipated. To know these characters, I had to travel through time and place—I was going to Iran from the 1940s through the mid-2000s, to Los Angeles from the 1980s, to New York in the near present. Elizabeth is an artist in love with someone she could never marry. Niaz is a rebel in Islamic Republic Iran even as a young girl. All of them have lost their country. I was writing about love and loss, but also money and art and revolution. I was asking the question: at the end of an era, what do we get from history, and from our families?
