Transcript: Well this is somewhere in the middle of the novel shortly after, you know, Xerxes and his father have gotten into a huge fight when the father has visited him in New York. And some months have gone by and he’s become essentially estranged from his family. And it’s not until the morning of 9/11 that he sort of realizes that he should pick up the phone and call them. He’s in New York in the East Village, and they are in Los Angeles. And so 9/11 becomes the occasion on which he has to somewhat reconnect. So let me just read.

“Almost exactly eight months after his father left him in New York, Xerxes Adam was awakened to the hottest summer day of the year by the invasion of a rather unwelcome mental slide show – visions of that distant prime creator, his mother. Maybe he dreamed of her all night, every night even. Who knew? He hoped not. He hoped it was just his conscious in calculation mode sending the alarm that it was time. “Xerxes, time. Your mother is waiting.”

His mother had now left what he estimated must be 100 and something messages in 30 something weeks. The first third had been desperate, and urgent, and worried. “Please Xerxes,” she would say, adding, “My son” in a shaky voice in way that made him feel as if his entrails were melting.

The second third angry, annoyed, acerbic, trickling eventually to a just pissed snippiness. “And who are you mad at exactly?” she would snap.

The third third cheery, oblivious, delusional, often delivered in the form of five-minute plus, often diary entry-like recordings that chronicled her day – just disjointed spewing of whatever was on her mind at the moment; only at the end perhaps tagging on, “Maybe you will call.” Or, “This is your mother wondering how you are, but not wondering too hard. Bye-bye.” Or like the last one, “Here’s to you being all okay or whatever. __________.” It was the type of good night you’d leave a stranger. She would slam the phone down and turn off the lights. At some point she decided that calling at her bedtime would be best. They were three hours deeper into the night, and so he’d certainly be in at 1:00 in the morning; maybe 2:00; hell 3:00, at midnight her time. And she’d give up and force herself to sleep. But not without giving the possibly pretend sleeping mass of husband next to her a sharp nudge and lecture. “This is getting crazy Darius,” she would hiss into the darkness. “What the hell did you do to him? He’s our son. This is something you did. Now you get him back, you hear me? He’s your son too. I don’t care what you say. Just bring him back to life.” He’d mumble incoherently and toss and turn as if to signify some grand struggle. “I’m telling you,” she would continue. “Some other parents would call the police. How do we know he isn’t, you know . . .”

Xerxes wondered how she would possibly know if he was dead. She wouldn’t. This was one thing about New York he realized immediately – that to die in this city was to die. The end. Click. Exit human. No one would notice. No one would fight it or even interfere. No one would even notice. No one was looking. And if someone find you, well fine. You were just another of the many who died in the city daily – mysterious, natural, unsolved, homicidal, suicidal, whatever. You were a number, and if you didn’t like that you could leave. He did not want to leave. There were sacrifices worth making for the city, he had decided long ago. But it did alarm him that perhaps she had resigned herself to thinking the worst in this third stage of messages. Perhaps she did assume he was dead. And perhaps she noticed any clues to the contrary – a changed message greeting at best – as simple surprises; grains of evidence for an alternate universe she had once fought for but eventually tired of. Maybe his mother had done what no other mother in the history of the domestic matriarchy had done in regard to her offspring. Maybe she had abandoned hope.

This barely conscious reflection on his two-thirds of a year’s worth of inhumanity, combined with the sickly stickiness of a peculiarly oppressive 9:00 a.m. heat jolted him fully awake as if from a falling dream. Of all people, why had he shed his mother from his life? He remembered being a child and being mad at her – her so much more often than him. Because it was she who was constantly stepping into his world, combing and gelling his hair when all the boys wore it messy; wiping his face, fiddling with his shirt, tying his shoes for him; always hollering annoying reminders as he was on his way out; always checking on him at his friends’ houses; always tucking him in with embarrassing, often untrue admonitions or reminders, “You are growing up! You need to think about smelling good now that you’re growing up. Showering regularly to begin with, because I am about to vomit and I am your mother.” Or the most dreaded. “Imagine yourself in the future and think, ‘Would my silly behavior today get me there? What would a future wife think now?’” Once in a while in a rage what would become constant repeat loop in his head would want to leak out. And his head answered everything. Everyone annoying and adult was the sinister kiddy staple, “I wish you would die.”

Once to Xerxes’ own adult embarrassment, he remembered being pushed – pushed to say it out loud, though it best in a weak whisper.

“What did you say?” she’d snap furiously.

“I wish you . . .” He had paused, sure he could see a glimmer of tears in her eyes. Although in retrospect he thought that any human’s eyes, naturally slimy and liquidy, could look tearful if guilt steered you in that direction. And he had rephrased, “I wish you guys would die.” Psychologically it was better for him, but its true genius was in being better for her as well. “You guys” became the great equalizer. It was something more like, “I wish the whole institution of you – parenthood – would die, not you personally.” All she had done was shake her head. She still tucked him in. And so he wondered now too many years later how at 6:00 a.m. their time and their other heat; their dry, dull warmth of West Coast, versus his merciless, wet, dirty big city tropical wave – how we could reach her and soften his blow. He had basically in his silence and his refusal to reach out said, “I wish I was dead to you,” and he had gotten what he wanted. He might as well be. So when he finally did it that morning – did the dreaded dialing of a number he grew up with, which still seemed so natural – the automatic sequencing of otherwise illogical numbers that he had worked so hard to render unnatural – he didn’t even consider that she might not be the one to pick up. As life goes it had to be him. His father with his usual gruff, reluctant, “Hello,” but put the emphasis on “hell”, which he was probably conscious of, or probably found funny, or else unapt. “There is no God,” Xerxes sighed. Xerxes slammed the phone down, shoving it deep into a draw as if to pretend it never happened. He closed his eyes and buried the day back into his pillow.

Three weeks later, a day after the first one third of September 2001, he finally called when life finally gave him a push to put whatever pettiness between him and that number aside, if only for a day when he knew risking him could no longer be an issue. That he had to – had to more than ever announce himself as living; as one of the many who that day felt like a few; who had lived through it, so far at least. And through the few dial tones he said to himself over and over, “There is a God. There is a God. Oh please let there be a God.” And suddenly there she was answering without even a “hello”; just that mystical, all-knowing mother’s “Xerxes?” And the first thing he could think to say was the only thing that he knew true in that surreal hell of a day.

“Mother,” he declared breathlessly. “I am alive.”

Darius was, of course, at her side just barely making out the sound of the receiver at his wife’s ear. His son’s voice was that usually __________ high, chipmunk garble that phones render voices. “It could be anyone’s voice,” he thought. “It all sounds the same, except that is my son.” His son calling from the heart of a danger he could not comprehend at the moment. He drowned him out and drowned out his wife’s overcompensating, awkward coos and exclamations and turned the news louder until they both disappeared into the unrelenting dissonance of disaster. On the television they crumbled over and over – two tall, perhaps too proud totems of the city; two towers erected to be each other’s image indistinguishable, somber doubles; each dying the same death; neither intolerable when it came to supposedly inevitable. Over and over it replayed. One went down. The other stood solo. Fast forward to a new clip. The other goes down just as the first, and then nothing. Where his son was it was sunny. It was also sunny where he was. He squinted out the window and imagined the entire sky over America smiling heartlessly. He imagined his homeland that was almost dark. He thought that there was, at best, only a moon over Iran, and he thought how nice that was. He closed his eyes, and gone were the repeating images on the television. And gone was that blinding brightness, and he let the just so dark wall of his eyelid melt into the image of the twilight Tehran sky. It was time to go home.”

Recorded on: 1/18/07

Transcript: There’s definitely been a lot of talk of the young Brooklyn writer. And there’s now been the backlash for sure. You know I got called a Brooklyn writer not too long ago, and I was torn between a sense of pride or a sense of embarrassment, because now it’s become such a thing. I think we, again, have to think of why that phenomenon exists, right? Brooklyn was initially a cheap neighborhood for writers to live. And you could have space. And you could, probably most importantly, have your own office, which is what I have now in my current place in Brooklyn. I have a nice office. I wouldn’t have been able to get that in Manhattan at the modest price that I’m paying. So there’s those considerations. But then, you know, you get enough artists and writers moving to a neighborhood, the thing begins to brand itself – probably originating in a sense of pride, right? People saying, “Well yeah,” you know, “We’re Brooklyn writers and this is our thing,” and you know trying to defend themselves. And then it becomes a sort of embarrassing brand. So yeah there’s times . . . You have to sort of say it with a smile, you know, that you’re a Brooklyn writer. But that’s probably gonna change because Brooklyn is getting awfully expensive – to the point where it’s definitely in competition with Manhattan, especially the savory parts. So I don’t know. I wonder in a few years are we gonna have the Queens writer, you know? And then far into the future it will be the Staten Island writer, you know? It’s scary. But what I don’t like about it is that it takes so much attention from all the writers that don’t even live in New York. That’s one thing about the book tour that was so interesting to me, and about the friendships I have forged with the other writers who live all over this country. And you know I think I always thought that as a writer you needed to live here. And even recently I thought it’s a good idea to be near my editor, or my agent. And you know it’s sort of a fallacy. So I don’t like the feeling that . . . I don’t like spreading the sort of idea that writers need to live, if not in Manhattan, then right by it. Because the beauty is now you can, for the most part, live everywhere . . . anywhere you want. But I do love Brooklyn, and I like . . . I like my new neighborhood in Kensington. There’s a lot of . . . There’s a very vibrant Middle Eastern community there that I can spy on, which is fun. And you get a great diversity in Brooklyn, and it’s just affordable and it’s beautiful. So a formula works I guess.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: Well I think the main bit of advice I would give them is to don’t go by the advice of other writers. Everyone’s story is so different and you’ll get so much conflicting advice. I was constantly seeking the advice of my mentors or other writers while I was writing the book, after the book came out, during the book tour – you know everything. Every step of the way I was like, “So how is this done? What do you do?” and they would all give me conflicting answers. And so I think for young writers the best thing to remember is that the world is just run by other humans who make lots of mistakes, and who are trying their best and sometimes doing their worst. And there really are no rules. You have to really have some sort of common sense and good intuition. Is it annoying to call your agent, you know, 12 times a day? Yeah probably. You probably wouldn’t do that to your friend. Is it bad form to stock, you know, this potential agent? Is it . . . Is it a bad idea to copy the architecture of another novel . . . of a bestselling novel in hopes of making your own book a best seller? Probably. So there’s a lot of common sense things that people often forget when they decide to become writers. And because there’s no real blueprint they . . . Like I did, they sort of start interviewing everyone around them about what to do and they get more confused. So the more I’ve thrown away the script, the easier it’s all been for me. I used to get very nervous before any form of press. Or I would think of a shtick to have at a reading. And then the minute I sort of tossed all that, everything started to go much more smoothly. So yeah, I say ditch the script.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: I’m working on a novel and a collection of short stories. The collection of short stories has a lot to do with the Iranian exile community, again through sort of a humorous perspective. Then my second novel I just sort of came to recently, and that will be sort of my sophomore daughters after my debut sons. But I am going to sort of force myself into considering the female psyche this time around. And the book is, I think, for the most part, going to be about the network of wives and daughters of a certain greatest terrorist of all time in the context of a sort of floating harem. I’ll say that. I was very interested in the women that came forth in the press. And in fact there were only women that came forth in the press really admitting to connections with Osama bin Laden. And I’ve been reading a lot of their interviews. It’s quite a cast of characters, and all of them seem quite larger than life. So I was very sort of inspired by that. And I was inspired by their courage – for some of them the courage. Some of them were just totally over the top, and who knows what sort of connection they really had. But I was inspired by the press. Sometimes it’s not what actually has happened that I find inspirational, but how the press . . . the filter . . . the press’s filter on events and renderings of public figures. So even if these . . . if their stories are not accurate or real even, they give a good story. And I’m very excited by these women.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: I think a lot of the Iranian novels of the last 20 years or so – highly overrated. I don’t think they . . . they have good writing in them. And I don’t think it was a priority for those writers to push themselves in terms of writing. Nor was it a priority of their publishers to put out great writing. I think they were selling, again, the image of a woman in a veil crying maybe in a kitchen. So I’m very frustrated with that. And I hate to say that on some level, but I do take it personally that some of the writing is so bad. I wonder if those people are writers even, you know? It’s not enough to have a story to tell. Everybody has a story to tell. I really believe that. And then there’s cycles in history where one person’s story becomes more relevant than someone else’s, say. But what goes around comes around always, and so I just think that when you compare the sort of literary tradition in Iran, and then put that up against those types of books that have come out in the immigrant community, the exile community – it’s just shocking. I mean Iran is a country where you had such a progressive poet like __________ – one of the, you know, greatest confessional poets probably in all of history – you know, writing this incredibly candid, startling verse in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And then you also had a writer like _________ who, you know, could be talked of in the same breath as _________ and _________; and his sort of intensely scary, incredibly progressive, and innovative writing. And then to compare it with the stuff that’s come out, it’s just sort of embarrassing. You know it’s like looking at the great Indies versus Hollywood blockbusters. So that motivated me to try to write a book where the actual sentences were, you know, rich and well done.

A lot of the female writers, I have been sent their books before. And I . . . Their shadow has sort of followed me a lot, you know. And I’m sort of expected . . . been expected to embrace them and say, “We’re all a happy family of these female Iranian writers.” But if anything I think they made it tough for me to get my book published because I wasn’t interested in those buzz words. And I wasn’t interested in telling that same story that seems to over and over capture western audiences. I wanted to tell a different type of story, and I wanna continue to write a different type of book. I’d like it to be incidental that I’m Iranian eventually. But for the time being I’m sort of interested in some of those Middle Eastern issues. I happen to be, so I might linger there for a while longer. But my hope is that I can eventually be freed of what’s expected of a person with my background.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: Well I have a completely obsessive love for “Wuthering Heights” like I think many writers do. But I think it’s probably the only novel I’ve ever cared to re-read, and re-read, and re-read. I hate the idea of re-reading, but “Wuthering Heights” is a big one because the whole book is so eccentric, and so passionate, and crazy, and delirious, you know? It’s too bad the chic lit writers didn’t go by that model, because it’s a romance, you know? But it’s done in such an eccentric, wild manner. I love it. Then I would say “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, of course. That’s a big one because of the relentless innovation, and the play as well as the ___________. “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon, a big one. Boy this is a hard one. This is brutal. I’ve had three.

I would say a very important novel definitely would be Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, which I get into fights with people about because I like it better than “Midnight’s Children”. And I like it as much for the story and the prose as much as for its significance. It’s not just a book, but it’s an important cultural moment. And then . . . And then probably I would have to put a tie between two books I find similar – James Salter’s “Light Years” and Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Road” – which I always think of hand-in-hand because they have the similar obsession. But I like that American novel. To me those are the great American novels, and I like the clean nature . . . the clean prose. It’s very different from my own, and I think I can learn a lot from that sort of writing. Yeah, I think those are it.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: I would say that other than the . . . Great 19th century novelists – you know the Europeans definitely. The same books everyone has read. And you know I could go on about Tolstoy, ___________, you know the Brontes, Dickens, all those guys. But I would say the writers that have probably influenced me the most – maybe not in terms of my actual writing style, but in terms of me being excited about writing and wanting to be a part of that world – would be the American writers of . . . the American experimentalists actually. And that . . . By that I mean great writers like Thomas Pynchon, and Don _________, and David Foster Wallace – writers who have earned that slightly unfortunate tag “Meta Fiction” you know? And the absurdists, the hysterical realists, those guys. It’s sort of strangely a boys club. But the . . . They’re . . . You know when I . . . When I started reading David Foster Wallace, I felt so excited. I might have been in college, and I just felt like, you know, here’s a big nerd who thinks the way I think and wants to have fun at the same time as being smart. The play in those books is just endlessly, endlessly interesting to me. You know I find it very oppressive when people say, you know, “So and so is a great story teller.” I cringe a little bit at the idea of storytelling and just saying, you know, “Well this novel, it’s just an amazing story.” I don’t think story is enough. I think we forget that sometimes. Craft is not just . . . I think of myself as a language writer, and the style of the prose was . . . I’ll say thinking about the style of the prose in my novel was . . . took just as much energy if not more than the actual story. The story is fairly classical than the story that’s been told before, but the prose I think isn’t. So I had to create a style of prose in the same way that I felt David Foster Wallace did, or Thomas Pynchon, or those writers. I’m really interested in the art of fiction. I don’t just believe in character, plot, theme.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: Well I have an Internet addiction – a really, really bad, bad form of Internet addiction where, you know, I have spent full eight hour days on the Internet, to the point where I should just become like one of those employed bloggers or something because I can’t stop. An average day I’ll probably be on the Internet for about four hours. I have 12 to 15 blogs I might read regularly. Then I have to go through all my news sites – conventional news sites, alternative news sites, compare, contrast; know exactly what’s going on in the world several times a day. So . . . But for me the Internet, on the up side of it, is sort of an endless source of inspiration. There’s no excuse anymore, I think, for writer’s block really when you could go hit up a number of eccentric blogs on topics from . . . You know you could read the blog of pro-anorexic women. Or you could read the blog of soldiers in Iraq. And hear those . . . And blogging offers this sort of, I think, very genuine, first person universe that’s . . . that’s endlessly fascinating to me. I mean that . . . When you can find those blogs that sort of feel like diaries, it’s so refreshing. And there’s always some kernel in those for me to get very inspired by. So I generally get way too many ideas from the news and blogs. And I sometimes encourage my students to do the same. All those hours that you’re fiddling and doing god knows what on the Internet, you can justify it and say you’re actually creating some form of art in a sneaky way.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Question: How do you write?

Transcript: I write very fast, and I write in great volume. Big and fast is really the way I write, mostly because I wanna get to . . . through the arc as fast as possible. I don’t like insecurity, and I don’t like surprises, and I don’t like not knowing. So I really . . . Say I’m writing a short story. I’ll try to get to the end as fast as possible. And then I’ll spend the next few months or the next few years editing. Editing is a big part of my process. It’s probably 75 percent of it. But you know the novel was written in about seven months, first draft. It was very fast. And I didn’t write every day of those seven months either. I would have these relentless weekends that I would just write from, you know, 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning until, you know, 2:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. So I would, you know . . . And then it took another two and a half years to edit that novel. But fast and big definitely is something that I believe in, and is necessary for me. I’d love to be one of those writers who labors over every sentence, and just goes one sentence at a time. But that’s not really my nature. I believe life is short, and let’s try to get it out there. And just keep going and not take the whole process too seriously. There’s so much talk among writers about the holy experience of writing, and the sacredness of the art. But that’s very intimidating. And that’s very . . . As a teacher I don’t like to tell my students to think that way. It’s not really gonna save the world at the end of the day. If you wanna help people, go out to soup kitchens. Go out . . . You know work one-on-one with the homeless and the truly disenfranchised in the world. But go there and physically do it. Writing a book is not gonna feed anyone at the end of the day. So I try not to, you know, put all that posturing into it. And I also don’t believe in writing every day. I think that’s what creates writer’s block – this feeling that you must write every day. Because then I would think eight out of 10 days you’re gonna feel like a very bad writer, and I don’t have time for that. I wanna write when I actually feel good about what I have to write. And so that might just be a couple times a week. It might be for like a month nonstop. But I’ve never put that pressure on myself. I’ve never been one to read the advice of other writers, or to play by those sort of “rules” – the sort of John Gardner school of, you know, how to be a writer and think of the whole process. I’m sort of in the . . . You know I’m a naturally nervous person, so I’d like to cut down on as much anxiety as possible.

Question: How do you edit?

Transcript: Well I generally work . . . You know the material that I have, the very raw material is awfully raw. It’s . . . Sometimes my sentences don’t have periods. Sometimes they’re just fragments. Sometimes every word is misspelled and a jumbled mess, and there might be four adjectives when I only need one. So I have to really go sentence by sentence and take the rock and chisel at it and get, you know, what for some would be their first attempt and a normal sentence out of it. So it’s . . . It’s pretty brutal, but knowing that I have the whole arc . . . I have a beginning, middle, and an end really becomes encouraging because then I can look at the minutia. But if I don’t have the microcosm, I can’t look at the micro. There’s no way. So I really have to actually go back and write sentences, literally.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: A big role. I have a lot of humor in the novel – dark humor usually. It’s sort of part of who I am, and part of the literature that I’ve always loved. Humor is a way to cope with some of the heaviness of the novel. Humor was always my answer. It was my way of fitting in as a kid in elementary school, you know, and it being very obvious that I was a foreigner. I have an unpronounceable name. My parents were always overdressing me for school. I, you know . . . Early on I didn’t have a completely great grasp of the English language. And so my way of coping with that time period was to be kind of weird, and embrace that, and not completely be the class clown; but definitely have a huge sense of humor about my funny dresses, and my funny name, and you know and my big hair. And so I immediately became that sort of kid, and I always took a lot of pride in not completely fitting in. For instance I never had a slumber party experience. My parents never wanted me to spend the night at any other kid’s house. And you know I would always act like I didn’t want to. And I would make fun of these girls who would gather and, you know, read their issues of YM, and talk about boys and clothes. You know I would always beat them to . . . to the making fun and talk about how I thought they were such losers because they had these sort of girlie moments. Or my parents discouraged me from going to school dances and all that. Or I wasn’t allowed to go out on Friday nights or something like that. I would always act . . . I would always use that to my advantage and act like I never wanted to, and eventually I didn’t. Eventually I wanted to be at home on a Friday night reading and writing. So I became a bit of an antisocial, iconoclastic character more and more as I grew older. And I began to embrace that, and humor just became part of that package. And so the novel is definitely punctuated with laughter – usually the self-deprecating sort, which is most close to me I think.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Question: What is it like being a young female writer?

Transcript: Well on the one hand being a young female writer, you know, there is the sort of obvious disadvantage that you’re not being taken as seriously – that it still, you know . . . You’re dealing with a world that largely takes middle aged White men seriously. And so, you know, you sometimes get the feeling that people are saying, “Wow,” you know. “This young girl can write!” You know, “Look at that!” And that’s somewhat hideous and embarrassing. But there are definitely advantages. There’s another level of press worthiness I suppose that comes from it, again, from that bad impulse of like, “Oh look! A young woman can write!” It’s a strange feeling because I never thought of myself as that young. There’s several . . . There’s been many great novelists in the last decade that have had works out that have been much younger than me. I just turned 30 yesterday, so I was excited to have the novel come out while I was still in my 20s – the last few months of it. But you know it was sort of a strange feeling to have some of the press focus on that, you know, yeah you’re more likely to have your photo run with you . . . with your book review, say, in the New York Times or something like that. And I just hope that people weren’t snickering at that, and that wasn’t off putting. But I also feel like sometimes people immediately assume that young women will be writing some form of chick lit, and that was frustrating. I immediately got raised eyebrows when they realized that this novel had a lot to do with fathers and sons, and that it wasn’t gonna be a sort of, you know . . . that Iranian women’s novel or memoir that they seemed to all really want. So the curve ball, I guess, has offered an interesting story.

Question: Does a bright young thing age well?

Transcript: I think luckily in the field of literature there’s not that sort of anxiety. You get the feeling that, you know, the best writers always hit their strides later. And for the most part you’re not gonna have all the glamorous photo shoots, right? And you’re not gonna have that much attention put on what you look like. And you know maybe Zadie Smith has paparazzi moments, but most of us won’t. So luckily I don’t think so. I think, you know, that might be reserved for the world of models and ballet dancers. And that’s exciting because I like that I . . . I probably will never experience retirement as many do. So no, I have no anxieties about that. I’m excited. I’m excited about getting older because it seems to be less distracting. Youth can be very distracting I think. And even getting some of that press is quite distracting. You know much of the last four months of my life, you know, have the sort of atmosphere about constant anxiety about, “Oh did I say that right” in some interview? Or, “What did I look like in that interview?” Or like, you know, “Do I . . . Should I go to this event, or should I . . .” You know so much of stuff that has nothing to do with the book, and nothing to do with me being a writer. And it was very distracting. So I think writers value quiet and introspection more than anything. And so a future of more of that seems not so bad as long as it can still somehow go hand-in-hand with a living. But I’m also a teacher, so I hope to always be in the academy somehow, and hopefully depend on them for my earning a living more so than the world of publishing.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: You know I wanted a sort of light touch because there were so many stories I could tell in this book. And part of it was just a focus on the father and the son. But memory is never . . . . Memory as a function never offered as the full story, right? The way we remember things is never obviously as they actually happened. It’s always a tidbit – a handkerchief, a color, a smell, a wisp of hair, a street sign. It’s always something, and I was interested in the sort of inherently fragmented nature of memory. So that comes across . . . You know there’s a scene in the novel where he describes a sort of . . . Xerxes the protagonist describes the sort of fear of Ed McMahon. He’s horrified by him as a . . . as a celebrity. He never knows why he has such an adverse reaction to seeing him on Star Search or, you know, Publishers’ Sweepstakes or whatever he did. And he traces it back to the first time he ever saw Ed McMahon on TV. His parents were having a fairly politically charged fight. And then later in life he also explores what that sort of symbol of Ed McMahon meant to him, and the sort of . . . He imagines drilling a hole from underneath Ed McMahon’s shiny designer shoes, through the center of the earth, and coming on the other end. And then if you did that, on the other end would be the hands and knees of people who looked more like him. So there’s a lot . . . There’s _________ in this novel. There’s the conjuring of old memories. And then there’s reflection on the conjuring of memories. There’s a lot of . . . There’s a lot of . . . There’s a multi-layered treatment of memory. How do we actually remember it? And how do we actually reflect on it? It becomes a thing in itself, you know. The ghost in the room actually takes on some flesh at some point.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: Crisis is sort of inherent in the novel from almost the first page. You know sort of the . . . the . . . the _________ minor crisis of family life, you know. In the beginning the son probably for the first time realized that he and his father don’t think eye-to-eye when his father goes on this eccentric crusade to rescue all the blue jays in their apartment complex by putting bell collars on all the cats. And he gets out of control and begins kidnapping all the neighbors’ cats at one point. And the son has a lot of anxiety and fear, and part of it is because they are somewhat recent immigrants. I was interested in the sort of minor crises. And then those juxtaposed against the sort of brilliant crises. And by brilliant I mean the sort of, you know, stunning and horrifying crises of our lifetime. And 9/11 was a major one. It was a personal one for me. It was less a political choice, but a personal choice because I was there. I was a resident of lower Manhattan. You know I had to witness the thing outside my own window. It was a perfect view. So for me it seemed . . . You know a lot of people say the first novel is generally the most autobiographical. It often ends up being by default somehow. But I did find, as I was writing it, the feeling that I wanted to get in all the traumas of my life into 400-something pages. I had to throw some out of course, but there were . . . There was . . . The shadow of the Islamic revolution was a major one. And then that put against 9/11; and the feeling that 9/11 to someone who is Iranian doesn’t necessarily mean much ethnically or culturally; but it does mean that all the things that you left your country for, you know . . . Most Iranians came here to get away from an unstable government, and the sort of explosive nature, or the explosive clashes of religion. And then to have it happen again once you’re here times a thousand . . . times you know . . . it was a very difficult experience. I kept thinking . . . In some early journal entries, I remember writing I always thought I could finally escape my, you know, ethnic identity. And here’s the Middle East . . . And now the Middle East has come to me. My family tried to get us out of that, and here it was outside my own window about a quarter of a mile away. So you know those sort of global crises become opportunities for us to sort of reflect on all . . . you know our whole lives. And so I was forced to do a lot of examining of my entire life after that point. You know going through a lot of different . . . going through lots of the bad imagery of my life in order to come to certain conclusions about that sort of catastrophe.

I don’t think I’ve ever known a time outside of crisis. I think it just happens to be when I was born and, you know . . . You know 1978 I was born. And then you know within a year you had the Iran hostage crisis. And then you had the advent of the Iran-Iraq war by 1980. And even though I wasn’t personally, you know, involved in some way in those, they were . . . they were very much present in my household – talk of them and on the news. There was no escaping it. So I’ve always felt like the atmosphere of catastrophe has just been around me. And I even remember feeling, you know, a day or two after 9/11 that that was coming all along – you know that was definitely gonna happen. Because my whole childhood I’d had all these sort of chaos dreams that had to do with cities just erupting. And they were so abstract. All I just remember was people being covered in rubble running through the streets. And then when I . . . When I think about the images we saw on TV that day, you know and we can continue to see, it’s sort of perfect mirror images. So in a sense I think . . . You know the ‘90s I suppose were a little bit of a break for a lot of us, you know? But why were they a break? Because we weren’t listening to the news or something? Because we weren’t really taking the time to understand what was going on in Bosnia, for instance? But I do remember I had that . . . I felt like “Okay . . .” In the ‘90s I had a little bit of a break. My biggest worry was probably would I make six figures a year when I got out of college like everyone else was, you know. And then you know I graduated in 2000, and 9/11 happened in 2001. So for much of my . . . In much of memory, there’s been a lot of bad, bad imagery that’s been hard to run away with. And because of the type of family I come from, we’ve always been obsessed with news and politics, that I never have felt that I was distanced from it in any way. I always kept my earthquake preparation kit handy. I, you know, had that on the day of 9/11. We were one of the first cars that got out of the city because of me somehow feeling like emergency mode was familiar. It’s Strange.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: Well I wanted to at that moment give the most mundane edibles of American existence, right? For young people particularly, I wanted to create . . . Even though Xerxes has gotten his first apartment in New York, it might as well have just been a dorm. He had no real food. He had, you know, dry cereal, stale milk, and some odds and ends in the house. And for the father who was just visiting him for the first time in New York, it was a shock. You know in Iran and in Iranian households out here, food is major. And food is a celebration, and it’s always a feast. And you don’t . . . You know my parents were always horrified when they would hear of how I lived in the States; and how, you know . . . how I always had this scrappy, college-like existence. They would probably think the same today if they visited my apartment. But it’s so at odds with the sort of natural grandeur that Persian households try to instill. So I wanted . . . I think that that was sort of an easy moment for cultural reflection. You know I think it’s a lot of those mundane things, a lot of those small details that add up to the bigger conflicts. Those . . . those little moments where people see their differences that create greater and greater divides. And for the father and son in the novel, those differences ultimately reach a really devastating boiling point that looks irreparable.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: There are small things I can think of straight off the bat. But for instance I remember growing up and my mother always saying, “Never cut your fingernails after dark.” And to this day I probably have never cut my fingernails after dark. And I thought about it and I researched this a little bit. It doesn’t appear in my novel, but I was interested in why on earth do a lot of Iranians think that you can’t cut your fingernails after dark. And the origin, I believe, of this superstition is it was in the Arab pre-electricity. People would actually get hurt, you know, utilizing scissors and cutting their fingernails, or toe nails, or whatever in the dark. Or with kerosene lamps or whatever they used. I don’t know. But it seemed to me that that was the reason. But I love that. I love that sort of folklore. But there’s tons of stuff like that. I grew up as a child completely neurotic because of all these things my parents would tell me – these ancient cultural voodoo that was always sort of present in our household. And it made me very, very stressed out as a child. How do you merge that with sort of modern living and trying to assimilate to this new world that you’re in? It was very difficult for me. You know I was very cognizant of learning English in the U.S. And I was . . . It was very harrowing for me because I was always trying to fit in and do it fast before anyone could notice a difference. But you know the minute some kids would meet my parents . . . You know the minute they entered the picture it seemed like they would just unravel my whole . . . my whole guise. So I was always a little bit at odds with them. I think that is definitely explored ad nauseum in the book.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: I wanted to write about men in crisis. So Xerxes, the younger protagonist, is at quarter life. And his father is at mid life – almost exactly. And so I also wanted to put them in a time of crisis like the post-9/11 era and examine men under pressure, and look at their conflicts and put . . . you know and examine their conflicts in a larger sense; look at how much global turmoil and historical turmoil has contributed to their interpersonal conflict. It became a kind of thesis for the novel – that sometimes the conflicts of men even in one family weren’t really about their issues, but sometimes about what was going on in the news, or what was going on in history books. I take a lot of pains to examine some of the ancient kings in Persian history, and then merge that with some of the prime characters in sort of 9/11 the story.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: My novel was mostly inspired by my own background as a new Iranian-American growing up in sort of unique circumstances in a suburb of Los Angeles. And then 9/11 was a major kick in the ass for me. So that in

Transcript: Since the novel has come out I have become. But previously I was never . . . I never felt part of the Iranian Diaspora community. I never knew where they were in Los Angeles. I had very little contact with the youth of Tehrangeles partially because I didn’t relate to them. My family wasn’t wealthy. You know we weren’t a bunch of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and we were not encouraged to be doctors, lawyers, engineers either. We were sort of a slightly artsy, nerdy family with my father as an academic. And we grew up very modestly in a small suburb, and I had very little contact with them. And when I would see them – those types of Iranians – I felt a slight sense of revulsion because they . . . they were the first . . . You know I felt that in trying to become Americans, they had sort of done it to such an exaggerated degree, you know? You suddenly had Beverly Hills High kids, you know, were platinum blonds; tons of designer clothes; you know BMWs, Mercedes. It was like everything about American culture that I didn’t like done to absolute excess. And so I really never met them. And when I went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, there were a few half Iranian kids and that was about it. And they were sort of like me. They hadn’t really grown up in an Iranian-American immigrant community. So I never had the chance to be around them much. And then when the novel came out, it did get the support of an Iranian-American community, and I was able to see that there were other Iranians like myself who didn’t fit into that Tehrangeles culture that I grew up very phobic of. And that was wonderful, and now I’m in touch with lots of Iranian and Iranian-American artists, writers, musicians, and they come to some of my readings. And it’s mostly wonderful. I get e-mails from a lot of people in Iran, actually, who can’t get the book, but who have heard about it. Iranians in Iran are on the Internet all the time. They’re obsessed with blogs and all that. So they’ve discovered me a little bit, and I get sort of interesting e-mails from them, which is fine.

A lot of them trying to figure out what my name means, am I Muslim or not. I get this all the time. Even in readings, you know, there will always be some old Iranian guy who will come up to me and ask me my religion, which I find very startling. But the Iranians in Iran are hilarious. I had one guy, an old . . . He seemed like an older carpet seller, and he wanted to . . . He gave me a long speech in his e-mail about what an honor it was for an Iranian to be getting press. And, “Congratulations on your victory,” it said. And then he said would you be interested in buying these incredible rugs he does of Zoroastrian images . . . imagery in very broken English. So he was trying to do business, I guess. And it was lovely. But I correspond a lot with some of the English speaking bloggers in Iran who are incredibly progressive, and incredibly bright and interesting, and are very curious about what’s going on here. And I get . . . Some e-mails . . . I’m on Good Reads, and I run a literature of the Iran and the Diaspora group there. And I constantly get e-mails from the Iranians there who . . . They’re always asking, “Well what are you guys reading? What are the good novels by Middle Easterners in the U.S.? Because all you people ever do is recommend “The Kite Runner” to us, and we hate “The Kite Runner””. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I’ve got from Iranians who just seem so upset about “The Kite Runner” being a hit here. They think the writing is pedestrian, which I think is very funny.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: Yeah. My . . . They were not . . . not really isolated instances, but they started to feel uneasy. I remember my father talking about some of our neighbors; you know, sort of dealing with different types of glances on a day-to-day in a very diverse neighborhood outside of Los Angeles. And my brother having some isolated instances of feeling like he was . . . You know he would have conversations with people on an airplane or something, and then you know he would mention he’s from Iran, and then people would immediately say, “Oh, how do you feel about all the terrorists?” And then my brother having to say, “Well none of the terrorists were Iranian,” you know.

I myself had a harrowing experience because I myself only became a U.S. citizen three months after 9/11 . . . two months after 9/11 actually. My father had never become a U.S. citizen. He’s still not a U.S. citizen and he never felt the need to be. You know I think he’s always had the feeling he would return to Iran permanently. My mother, you know, applied for U.S. citizenship and took me along with her to do that. And I thought, “Okay great. I can travel with much more ease through Europe and not have to pay all those visa charges and all that.” So we, you know . . . It just so happened that my court date to go and be sworn in and everything happened in November of 2001, so I just became an American then. Around December I took an Amtrak across country. I became very phobic of flying, particularly after 9/11. I had started taking Amtraks back and forth from coast to coast. And there was one incident outside of Buffalo, New York I believe. It was like midnight and, you know, we’d already been on this stupid train for hours, and I had finally sort of fallen asleep. And the train had stopped, and suddenly there were flash lights in all of our eyes. And I sort of looked at my boyfriend and I said, “What’s going on?” And he said . . . And there were these men who were dressed, you know, like police; but I don’t know if they were sort of border police or what really was going on. And they were going around with flash lights asking people what the country of their citizenship was. And I immediately said Iran. The guy . . . And you know I had just become an American citizen, but I have always said I was born in Iran, you know. I’ve always said I was an Iranian citizen. I forgot for a second. And the guy just said, “Excuse me?” And I said, “Oh no. I’m sorry. I’m a U.S. citizen.” And he paused and he had a moment of just looking at me very silently. And here I was in a hoodie, and a t-shirt and sweats, and he said, “You’re Iranian?” And I said, “No, no, no. I just became a U.S. citizen.” And I realized somehow they were dealing with so much chaos on that train. Because it was so unusual for everyone aboard, he didn’t take more time with me. But I felt there . . . That was my first instance of feeling a sense of horror at what it meant to be Middle Eastern today. And then really the only other instance I have had a very awkward sort of feeling was this past summer right before my book tour, I was living in ____________, which I think most of us think of as a bastion of, you know, liberalness in Brooklyn. And I was at the flea market there, and one of the guys was selling all these knick knacks and sort of these pins . . . mostly concert pins. And there was a pin there that said, “Fuck Iran.” And at first I looked at it and I thought, you know, what is that? It’s just, you know, sort of Arial font, “Fuck Iran.” I wasn’t thinking sort of historically, and I went up to him and I said, “What is this pin about? And may I have it? I’ll buy it so someone else doesn’t.” And he said, “Oh these are. . . These were those pins that they used to sell in supermarkets in the U.S. around the time of the hostage crisis. These were all over the place.” And he kind of said, “Well I didn’t get it. My colleague over there found it someplace.” And I said, “Well yeah, because I’m Iranian. I have to have this.” And he ended up not charging me for it and apologizing a few times. But I just remember shaking for hours as I walked home with this “Fuck Iran” pin that’s still on my mantle. And you know I had known about the “Fuck Iran” slogans and that . . . the incendiary nature of that time period. But until I had that pin in my hand as an artifact of that horrible time, it was never very real to me. And it’s been something I have held onto. It’s been an important reminder for me.

Recorded on: 1/18/08

Transcript: You know someone once asked me, you know, why did you choose to write about Middle Eastern men and not Middle Eastern women? I don’t know their reality. I don’t know any women in Iran who have had to wear the ___________, you know. I don’t know women of that era. My mother, you know, was in Iran last in the ‘70s at the height of the __________, you know. And she . . . In the summers she would go shopping in Milan. And you know they were quite western at that point. I don’t know what it’s like for Middle Eastern women today. But from what I’ve heard, you know Iran is the . . . From what I’ve heard, they are . . . they are a little bit perplexed by the image of Iranian women as incredibly downtrodden. There’s lots of jokes, and proverbs, and __________ about how, you know, Middle Eastern . . . or Iranian women are this force and the real force of the household, and I tend to believe in that. Obviously what’s happened since the revolution, it’s been horrible for women. And you know incredible human rights violations have been specifically targeting women. But I think their day-to-day reality is different. And Iran is a country where the majority of people . . . university . . . the majority of the university students are women. I think that’s interesting in spite of what’s been happening there. So it’s tricky to speak on that. Maybe that’s part of why I chose to focus on Middle Eastern men. They’re . . . I have an easier time imagining what it’s like for them. It’s . . . There . . . It’s a more complicated mixed bag with what’s happening with women there.

Recorded on: 1/18/08