So What's with All the Iranian Memoirs?

Once upon a time (in the early 1990s), I was one of two Iranian woman authors writing and publishing in the West. I know this is hard to believe, given the current wave of novels and memoirs by Iranian woman authors about Iran, or by American authors about Iranian women, or any other variation thereof. But when Crown published my first novel, Cry of the Peacock, in 1991, the manager at my local bookstore told me she had no category under which to shelve it. “How about fiction?” I offered, “since it's a story about Iranian Jews.” She looked at me like I had lost my mind and wound up putting the book in Judaica. When my second novel, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, was about to be released (in 1999), the publisher's marketing director assured me that the only people who would read it were other Iranian Jews. When Moonlight landed on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, she said, “It's doing well because of all your people out there.” When it hit #1 and stayed there, one of her colleagues said, “I had no idea there were so many of you out here.”

That was then. Nowadays, hardly a week goes by when I don't meet or hear about another Iranian woman writing a book. I find them everywhere—at readings and lectures around the country, at the hair salon and the grocery store. I met three at a bar mitzvah the other day. We practice the age-old Iranian ritual of inquiring about each other's health and happiness. Then they tell me they're writing a book—usually a memoir.

These women are joining what has become a full-fledged category unto itself. A search on Amazon (“Iran, Memoirs, Novels”) yields nearly 600 results. Most of these books were published in 2000 or later. Most were written by Iranian women. Most are memoirs.

So I find myself, at readings and interviews to promote my fourth novel, Caspian Rain, having to explain this trend. Someone invariably asks, Why are so many Iranian women writing books? Why so many memoirs? Is each one of these lives interesting enough to merit a book? Is there a market for all these books? Are Iranian women getting paid by the Bush administration to write bad things about Iran to convince the American people that a military attack against the country is a noble idea?

Iranian women are writing, I imagine, because they live in a place and at a time when they can speak the truth without fear of morbid consequences. They are getting published here, I assume, because they're writing good books, and publishers think there's a market for those books. Are all their lives interesting? Some are; others less so. And the “let's invade Iran with books” theory? Most of us have enough trouble invading the local Barnes & Noble with our books.

I'm glad there is so much interest in stories about Iran and that publishers find the subject worth investing in. I'm glad Iranian women have been given the freedom to speak, if not in Iran, then in the West (actually, many of our books do reach the old country: Western editions are pirated in Iran, translated into Farsi and sold on the open market). I know this is why I began to write—to give voice to all the voiceless women I saw as I was growing up, who lived difficult, often heroic lives, endured oppression and adversity with grace and restraint, and died in obscurity. This is why I thank God every day that I have the words and the freedom to tell those stories, and why I think exile has been so good for Iranians, especially for the women.

But trends come and go. Those of us who aspire to fulfill an author's real task—to tell the truth as she sees it, and to be ready to defend that truth—know that a book survives the ages not because it captures a particular place and era or because it fits a particular niche in the market, but because it transcends the personal and immediate, rises above geography, ethnicity and religion to arrive at a more universal truth—because it manages to address, to a satisfactory degree, what Faulkner called “matters of the human heart.”

This, in the end, is our task. Iran is only the setting.